In the endeavor to compete with and imitate painting, photography had to find a way to limit its endless reproduction of non-originals, meaning the production of copies and replicas, to make the remaining pieces valuable. Thus, the art world—by which I mean the art market—decided to limit the number of photographic copies. Of course, this is somewhat illusory since a negative can always produce an infinite number of copies, and a digital file can do so even more efficiently and with greater fidelity, reproducing photographs, or traces, indefinitely. In the photographic market, a limited number of copies became the norm arbitrarily. For example, a photograph might be released in five copies, and if more need to be sold, given a photograph's fame, the dimensions might be slightly altered, signifying a new series, and this can go on indefinitely. If someone needs to sell a photograph that is outside the numbered editions, they simply declare it as from the photographer's collection or archive. All these practices are prevalent in the market today, but to me, it seems a bit like a small deception, a betrayal of common sense, or simply, in plain Greek, a trickery of ourselves and others. A photograph has value and it is valued by the market, but this value is not the value of uniqueness. Alongside numbering, another clever idea emerged, called the vintage print, which is an old photograph that was originally printed by the photographer himself. This concept has expanded to include prints made within the last X years (recently defined as five years after the shot). All these measures aim to limit the fundamental potential of a photograph, which is the ability to reproduce endlessly and identically. Therefore, when we see a photograph on a wall, it does not differ much from an excellent print in a very nice book, whereas when we see a painting on a wall, no matter how fine the print in a high-quality book, it will never be the same, since in front of the painting we are exactly where the painter stood, seeing what the painter saw, in front of the painter's hand, offering a completely different dimension and potentially exploiting the element of uniqueness in terms of value.