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It's frustrating that we academics, who are not reading for leisure but as a part of our jobs, cannot put a book down if it seems boring or unconvincing two pages in.

In Theory of Film (1960) [Kracauer] would argue that the cultural contribution of photo images, still or moving, is to show new phenomena and, suspending an assumed familiarity with the world, to extend and preserve its visibility. If they are true to the medium, photo images show the pictured. Elucidating the particularity of the pictured, they metamorphose the visual 'raw material.' They do not, as does art, consume it, because as images they are not self-authorized: in her surrender to the experience of the natural-cultural world the photographer cannot suppress the presence of unseen things.

Dagmar Barnouw, Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the 
Work of Sigfried Kracauer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, ix)

Proposed translation: photography and film are culturally significant because they allow us to see our world in new ways. Paradoxically, photos and films that seem most "true" to the medium, eg that are "straight" or unmanipulated, actually transform the things they represent, giving us new insights into them.  Unlike art [and here Barnouw seems to be claiming that photography and film are something other than art], these photo-based images seem to be "authorless" and the removal of the subjective author allows us to better see the objective reality in them.

Other suggestions?