Classroom Resource: Empathy Through Photography

By Isabella Guerra Uccelli

Photographs are able to freeze reality. They are able to transport people in time and space. But what is left in a photograph if time and place are unidentifiable? What is the goal of the photograph then? What story does that tell? The article “16 children – 16 photos: Click the black background and switch on their reality” features pictures of refugee children where everything except the child has been blacked-out. While news and media coverage on refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced people often focus on the contexts affecting refugees, war, violence, climate change, and policies. The journalist Peter Jørgensen prompts us to change our focus to the child.

But these photo-edits raise also difficult questions about empathy. Brandeis Professor Jennifer Gutsell has done research on how people’s actions and feelings resonate with others. This resonance, she says, is key to understanding other people’s perspectives, feelings, experiences and therefore key to achieving empathy. Gutsell found that people find more (neural) resonance with people one has more in common with (ingroup members) than with outgroup members. She calls this the “empathy gap.” But this empathy gap, she found, is reduced and almost eliminated after people are asked to take the perspective of another person and express that perspective in writing. In line with Gutsell’s research, Jørgensen prompts the viewer to, before anything else, focus on and empathize with the child. The question is, does removing the context generate more empathy and if it does, does that empathy lead to action?

Explore the photographs with your students and consider the reflection questions below to guide the discussion.