A painted portrait by, say, Holbein or Rembrandt, is an extremely complex artefact, part icon, part representation, part symbol, part antique. In viewing a Holbein or a Rembrandt “in the flesh,” so to speak, we are looking both at an image and an object dating from the time it was made, and a complicated cultural talisman that subtends a multiplicity of interconnected considerations, one of which is certainly monetary. Even in reproduction, we can hardly look at a Rembrandt as a mere image, without also considering it as a banknote of boundless denomination.

The photograph is quite a different kettle of fish. Unless it is a so-called vintage print, which is a somewhat spurious attempt by the art market to lend the photograph the aura and the cachet of the painting/antique, the photograph largely blows extra-pictorial issues of market provenance away. Almost any half-decent reproduction of the Game of Madness or Blind Woman conveys their power. A photograph by definition is a reproduction rather than an original, a reproduction that carries and confronts us directly with an actual chemical trace of a human being in a particular place at a particular time. If we pause to think about that for a moment, we must admit that this is awesome, but it is an awesomeness of a totally different order to the painterly wonders of a Holbein or a Rembrandt.”

— excerpted from Gerry Badger “A Tale of Two Portraits: La Comtesse de Castiglione and Blind Woman”, in The Pleasure of Good Photographs.