Images are deeply connected to attention, memory, sex and any number of foundational human responses - but that does not mean that they can be taken as optimal routes to those subjects. Sometimes the images are there just because the writers have invested in them, not because images are needed to make the arguments work. ... it is assumed that ideas and information come to us in a unique form when they are given as images. That assumption is tricky, because our committment to images naturally leads us to think that ideas gotten through images are truer or more interesting than the same ideas outside of images.
Quoted from: Visual Studies a Skeptical Introductionby James Elkins, 2003.
