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ebock, I'm glad you brought up our class discussion -- since there's not another forum to use, I'll just use this one to continue it and hopefully spark a little more conversation.

I claimed last class that photographs and videos are more "honest" than words, and that this "honesty" is what gave Born into Brothels more potential to be compelling than an essay or non-fiction piece.  I know that's a loaded statement; "honesty" is a loaded word.  So I think it's important here to define what I mean by honesty: in this case, I mean that which must be true.  That is not to say that truth cannot be interpreted in different ways, manipulated, or created/taken out of a context.  But it had to have happened, because there is photographic or video of evidence, and so it must be true.

Words, on the other hand are more flexible.  Because we don't have "proof," an idea presented in words needs to work harder than one with images.  If shaped well, words can outdo images, be more compelling, and CAN be just as honest -- but they don't HAVE to be.  Reading about the holocaust, for example, is a different from watching the footage; there is honesty: it MUST be true, something that words have to work much harder to achieve.

I think this brings us back to the sort of unfortunate concept that the English language may not be flexible enough to bring the honesty we see in snatches of real life to words.  It is a skill in writing to bring many dimensions into a description or narrativie; in a video and photography, it is a given.