Are pictures more powerful than words? Today, a stunning photograph of an elderly Greek woman's anguish as her village burns has sparked a conversation on the impact of climate change.

For days, the wildfires on the Greek island of EviaThe second largest Greek island after Crete, it is situated in the Aegean Sea. have been burning with a ferocious rage. Now, the flames are flickering at the corners of her home, and Panayiota cannot find her husband.

She clutches her hand to her chest, tilts back her head and screams. Behind her, the sky glows orange.

At that moment, photographer Konstantinos Tsakalidis clicked his shutter. The next day, on Tuesday morning, Panayiota's image appeared on front pages around the world. Her cries of agony, recorded forever, shocked readers. One newspaper even named her "the new face of global warming".

"I want to get up one day and see everything as I knew it," Panayiota told reporters after reuniting with her husband.

For art critic Philip Kennicott, Tsakalidis's image "works on every level". Its contents are dramatic and harrowing. But the photograph's timing, coinciding with the release of a new climate report, also makes it hugely symbolic.

"This woman personified collective fear," Kennicott writes. "What she is suffering, we will suffer; what she has lost, we will lose. She lives on an island called Evia, we live on an island called Earth." 

For many psychologists, the reaction to Tsakalidis's photo of Panayiota Noumidi is not surprising. 

When a photograph of an unknown man blocking the path of tanks in Tiananmen SquareA huge open space in the middle of Beijing. It is known for a large-scale student protest that took place there in 1989 before being brutally crushed by China's communist rulers. spread across the globe in 1989, Time magazine declared that it "revived the world's image of courage".

Decades later, in 2015, a single image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi's lifeless body washed up on a beach in Turkey opened the eyes of millions to the plight of Syria's refugees.

Striking a chord

"It's like all the casualties we saw only ever registered in our heads without ever troubling our hearts. Well this week Alan changed all that," said British television personality Jeremy Kyle at the time. "One picture broke the heart of the world."

Psychologists believe that pictures showing individual suffering can trigger the "identifiable victim effect," enabling people to perceive the extent of a tragedy by seeing the victims as individuals. In one 2013 study, volunteers who were shown a picture of an orphan chose to donate more money than those who were only given a name. 

For some, photographs are far more powerful than any words that accompany them. Shortly before her death in 2004, American essayist Susan Sontag was horrified by pictures of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. 

"The pictures will not go away," she remarked. "That is the nature of the digital world in which we live... up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up and so much easier to forget". 

Years earlier, Sontag wrote in her famous collection of essays On Photography: "What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation... photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire."

Are pictures more powerful than words?

Yes, say some. Human beings think in pictures. We remember the feelings iconic images provoke, from the man in Tiananmen Square to Aylan Kurdi, long after we forget the specific details of a tragedy. The photograph of Panayiota Noumidi is already being compared to another famous picture - Edvard Munch's The Scream. It is possible that one picture could finally shock the world into action.

No, say others. Pictures, and especially photographs, can be misleading - they are two-dimensional snapshots of a moment, often lacking crucial context. Moreover, even the most shocking images change nothing without the rational and persuasive power of words. It is great speeches, from Churchill's call for war to Martin Luther King's "I have a dream", that truly change the world.