"telling image" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is used to describe a picture or illustration which provides a vivid or memorable representation of a concept, idea, or feeling. For example, a powerful photo of a person holding a sign saying "Equality for All" is a telling image of the need for equal rights.
The "walking Photofit" is a particularly telling image.
The telling image of this game came in the final seconds of the first period.
He was nature's tourist, and rarely at a loss for a telling image from his travels.
It's a pity the film was never made, because the script darts from telling image to telling image, building an impressionistic picture of Proust's creative apprenticeship in and around a louche Paris.
She has to climb high on lonely hillsides to get a signal; Hogg has created a telling image of inertia and seclusion from mobile telecommunications.
Whatever happened, this charred metal corpse is a telling image of a society that may be heading for the nightmare of war.
Hall's thoughts about identity, immigration and selfhood, evolve through a roar of telling images.
Appearing exactly two weeks apart, they were such memorable, telling images that they deserve some attention here.
Later, Benjamin gazed with epiphanic wonder at a fountain spurting in the square – one of too many symbolic nudges in a film already restless with telling images.
Here, again, there were a few telling images in the stream of processions and bursts of dancing, among them a shift of power between a rapist, who confusingly seemed to be the presiding Nuremburg judge, and his victim.
Looking Through Freud's Photos (Karnac £24.99) focuses on some telling images of Freud, his fellow neurologists, his intimates and family to excavate biographical facts, conundrums and missing links.
