I think the obvious thing to do here is to say "Always bet on symbolics".

What separates text from images is that text is symbolic while images are visceral or feelings based. In the same way, text comes in short when it comes to the feeling you get when seeing an image. Try to put in to text what you feel when you look at Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Speech or a crappy 0.5MB picture of your daughter taken on an iPhone 3. Hard isn't it? Visual and symbolic are not isomorphic systems.

Examples of symbolic systems like text are sheet music and Feynman diagrams. You would be hard pressed if you tried to convey even 2KB of sheet music in a book