Why photography is so effective on websites
Because it’s about emotion. A visitor will relax when they arrive on a site where the colours and typefaces have been thoughtfully combined, that doesn’t force them through oceans of text to get the information they need and is comfortingly lovely to look at.
Here's the science.
“Perceiving images is a more basic process than interpreting text. The meaning of images comes across immediately as real experience (and interpreted as such by the limbic system), whereas text is more remote, taking the route of the visual recognition of letters, the cognitive interpretation of language, and then finally meaning.
When the two conflict, the meaning of the image always wins. It is primal, emotionally based, and rapid.”