NEW YORK, NY.- For a documentary photographer who seeks to change the world, images go only so far. Dorothea Lange, a pioneer in the field, put it simply: All photographs, she said, “can be fortified by words.”

Photographs raise questions; they rarely provide answers. In the face of suffering and injustice, they are far better at evoking feeling than thought, at arousing empathy or horror, not at winning an argument. And so, photographers turn to words. Their challenge is to decide when it is better simply to show and at what point they must step forward to tell.

The risk is that a sea of words will drown pictures, not strengthen them. That was the case, for me, with the later portraits in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show opens with compelling family photographs that require only brief captions. But the portraits that record people struggling with contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, and with the closing of an automobile factory in Lordstown, Ohio, are embellished by long wall texts that dutifully examine circumstances too complicated for pictures to parse.

Asking viewers in a museum to stand in front of scroll-length explications is asking a lot. Even in the accompanying catalog, which a reader may fairly be expected to read, the written Flint and Lordstown testimonies overwhelm photographs that become formulaic, as if the artist has lost conviction that a camera can transmit her message.

Striking the right balance between words and images is tricky. In 1939, Lange, collaborating with her husband, progressive economist Paul S. Taylor, published a book, “An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion,” that incorporated material from interviews she had conducted with her subjects.

It was not something that photographers normally did. But the addition bolstered the photographs immeasurably, as with her portrait “Ma Burnham, Conroy, Arkansas” (1938). The image of quiet survival is powerful. It gains even more strength when you read Ma Burnham’s words, including: “I don’t know whether that drought was the Devil’s work or the Lord’s work — in three days everything wilted.”

Lange’s tradition continues. Four distinguished recently published books demonstrate that when done well, the result, as she had hoped, is fortifying.

The first, “Born Black: A Personal Report on the Decade of Black Revolt 1960-1970,” by Gordon Parks, originally appeared in 1971 and has been expanded in a larger format with additional photos and supplementary critical texts. Giving equal weight to words and pictures, this collection was a highly innovative hybrid.

Parks was the sole Black staff photographer at Life magazine and had been photographing African Americans for its pages since 1948. Before “Born Black,” he had published a memoir and an autobiographical novel. But he fashioned this text-and-image book in the belief that, as his editor (and future wife) Genevieve Young argued, a photograph is able to provide “the facts, the present, the tangible,” but “only words can convey the web of thought and emotion, the influence of the past and the fears and hopes for the future.”

“Born Black” amounted to a summation, as Parks was redirecting his attention from Life photojournalism to filmmaking and writing. His success had earned him a position that was both privileged and awkward. “Eventually I found myself on a plateau of loneliness, not knowing really where I belonged,” he wrote. “In one world I was a social oddity. In the other I was almost a stranger.”

At Life, Parks served as an emissary to the largely white readership that viewed the protests of the civil rights movement of the 1960s with alarm and bewilderment. Black leaders respected and trusted him, so he could portray Malcolm X on an airplane pensively reading, and Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, alone and uneasy on a road in Lowndes County, Alabama.

Readers of Life perceived that the man who took these pictures had unusual access to African Americans at all levels. What they couldn’t detect is the tension in straddling both sides of a racially divided country.

Often, Parks’ photographs were strong enough to stand on their own. When he photographed the Black Panthers in their communal-living headquarters in Berkeley, California, the images humanized these feared figures. In one photograph, Parks showed a female Panther frisking a female visitor who stood with arms extended. Entering a high-alert zone, she serves as a visual proxy for the reader.

As for Parks, he explained his own delicately thought-out position in words. He wondered how the Panthers could work “with such calm,” and he questioned their adherence to Marxism. Yet he also identified with them, writing, “I, like many other blacks, am at the point where white racism is enough to make me fight.”

Photojournalists oscillate uneasily between observation and participation, objectivity and advocacy. While that ambivalence is sometimes seen in the pictures, words can make the subtext visible.

At the instigation of Human Rights Watch, Platon — a British photographer whose full name is Platon Antoniou — undertook the photo sessions that fill his weighty new book of portraits, “The Defenders: Heroes of the Fight for Global Human Rights.” Depicting individuals who resist the violence of oppressive regimes, he can’t pretend to be neutral. His subjects gaze at the camera with dignity and compassion. A rare outlier on his roster is Vladimir Putin, whom he shot not for Human Rights Watch but for the cover of Time magazine in 2007. Viewed close up with a shallow depth of field, Putin, his mouth slightly pursed and his hooded eyes impassive, presents a face icy as a death mask.

It is a tribute to Platon’s artistry that his images often impart so much without any need for supplementary text. In a 2011 photograph, a pacifier hangs from the neck of a 2-year-old girl with enormous eyes and an expression just this side of tears. In one hand she holds a smiling doll with comparably huge eyes, and in the other, a framed portrait, draped in tricolor ribbons, of a handsome, serious young man dressed formally.

From the text, you learn that the portrait is of her father, who was killed by a sniper a few days earlier while demonstrating against the Egyptian regime in Tahrir Square. But even without that information you surmise that this child will soon leave her childish things behind. Parks’ editor Young had argued that an image could transmit only the factual present, but this photograph also conveys the tragedy of the past and the uncertainty of the future.

Sometimes, though, even Platon requires a text. In another photo from his Egypt series, you need to read that the shell of an office building behind burned-out automobiles housed the headquarters of Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. A photo of a hand and forearm extending through a slatted wall is a universal emblem of appeal that takes on specific valence once you discover that the arm is reaching in, not out, hoping for a handout of bread being distributed at a Catholic mission in Tijuana, Mexico, to would-be immigrants who have been stopped at the U.S. border.

Like Parks, Platon writes in detail about his picture-making process, outlining how he won the confidence of his subjects, describing the cloak-and-dagger perils of obtaining his shots.

Peter van Agtmael, in “Look at the U.S.A.: A Diary of War and Home,” goes one step further. His process becomes his subject. In 2006, a few years after graduating from Yale with a degree in history, van Agtmael shipped out to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Look at the U.S.A.” is a bildungsroman, in which van Agtmael moves away from war reporting to investigate what is happening in his country, and in doing so finds himself.

“How many pictures of the front line did I need to tell a story about war?” he writes. “What story was I even trying to tell? The more time I spent in the United States, the more I was seeing the intergenerational, systemic violence that was the backdrop of our whole history.”

In addition to his own words, van Agtmael makes use of sequencing to reinforce this theme, juxtaposing images to highlight resonances and ironies. A photograph of Marines in shorts playing a game of cornhole in southern Afghanistan is followed by one of a stressed and focused soldier before an ambush in a cornfield in the same village. A picture of a laughing Oglala Lakota man in South Dakota playing with the rope of a swing around his neck precedes a photograph of a white-robed figure walking to a Ku Klux Klan induction ceremony in the woods in Maryland.

His most mordant photographs are of Donald Trump supporters. An Armed Forces ball at the 2017 presidential inauguration could be social commentary by George Grosz, and a Trump campaign rally in 2019, with a crowd of ruddy-faced supporters wearing red hats and holding cellphones, has the collagelike hyperclarity of a magazine illustration — one that doesn’t require an accompanying article.

Even when he empathizes with his subjects, van Agtmael, like Parks and Platon, never forgets the distance that separates him from them. In “What’s Ours,” Myriam Boulos does her best to erase that distance. Depicting the violent protests in Lebanon in a turbulent time that culminated in the horrific Beirut port explosion of Aug. 4, 2020, she combines excerpts from her diaries with photographs. A feverish buzz animates her images — garish tones in the color shots, blurry focus or hectic compositions in many of the black-and-whites. She finds a lurid beauty in a fiery sky seen through a car window and in the delirious joy of New Year’s Eve celebrants in Martyrs’ Square.

Frequently, her photographs feature exposed skin and passionate embraces. She remarks that for herself and her friends, in the midst of constant grieving, sexual desire is aroused as an affirmation of life.

Rather than offer a photojournalistic account, Boulos wants to convey how the upheaval in Beirut makes her feel. She tells you that in the diaries, which, while they sometimes transcribe the testimony of friends, offer a first-person narrative. In the pictures, however, she uses outside situations to reveal her emotions. “Fire and broken glass spoke to me more than words,” she writes.

She takes the photographs as a way of ensuring that what she feels won’t evaporate without leaving a trace. “I can’t stop crying since the explosion,” she writes. “I feel like a glass of water that overflows constantly.” She recognizes that the “surreal highs” of her words and images is a physical, visceral response to what is happening around her.

Activist photographers hoping for regime change in Lebanon might have trained their cameras in a different direction, to document the sequence of political events that tore Beirut apart. But for anyone seeking a poetic rendition of what it was like to be alive and young in that revolutionary dawn, Boulos’ book is a fine place to start.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.