The speaker feels that many photographs are more actual than paintings because

I cannot say that I like photographs better than paintings, for I like them both. Each says something different to me.
    A photograph brings me face to face with an actual event and real people. A painting can never do that. The people in a painting most often come from the artist’s imagination. The photographer, however, can neither add nor take away from what is in front of the camera. You may have seen paintings of battle scenes. Many are very dramatic. But more powerful—at least to me—are the war photographs of soldiers in action or lying wounded or dead on the battlefield. A number of very haunting pictures were taken during the American Civil War by a photographer named Mathew Brady. While the painter imagined the battle in his mind and then painted it in a studio, Brady was there in the field. Because of this, many of his photographs create an effect that paintings do not. The young soldiers lying dead in Brady’s photographs had actually lived. The photographer had to be there on the battlefield to take those pictures.
    Thus, to me, photographs are better because of this one-to-one relationship with reality that is not possible in paintings.