In 'Bette Mifsud and the matter of photography' in Photogenic Papers Sue Best takes up that tired old duality of painting versus photography and the narrative that photography killed painting. She says:

The rivalrous and indeed violent relationship between photography and painting has a very long history; stretching from the painter Paul Delaroche's legendary prognosis on the birth of photography that: 'From today painting is dead' ... to the slightly acerbic asides from more recent writers on painting, such as Norman Bryson, about the dearth of theoretical writings on painting in comparison to the amount of critical attention lavishly bestowed upon photography....[In this narrative] Photography.... is aligned with the mechanical, the industrial, and in some way has contributed to, or produced, what is variously referred to as 'the crisis' 'the end' or 'the mourning' of painting....It would seem that not only has photography challenged painting, and indeed gained ascendancy over painting (if one concedes, as Lyotard does, the technoscientific world has more need for photography than it has for painting), it has also, to add insult to injury, become the very model for painting to follow.

But how does this place photography vis-à-vis painting? Is photography continuing the essentialist urge of the early avant-garde, asking about its identity in order to discover its irreducible essence, while painting enters the next phase: the end of the end, that is the end of the essentialist urge - its deconstruction..... This would tend to suggest that photography remains modernist in a thoroughly Greenbergian manner; exploring its 'intrinsic capacities' as outlined by John Szarkowski : detail, frame, thing itself, time, vantage point.