Why do I paint portraits?

My own art is not limited purely to portraiture, I have painted and drawn landscapes, cityscapes, still life, as well as dipping into sculpture and video, but portraits dominate my work and I have always returned to drawing and painting them. My version of portraiture is limited really to work directly from life and not from photography, but I can't really deny that there has been some great painting with photography as a starting point and where photography was used as a major reference, but when I have tried  to work from photographs, I find it difficult to know know when to stop and the resultant work can lose its life.

Given that, it is not really surprising that I don't really get hyper-realist paintings from photographs, the sort that dominate the BP portrait award at the National Portrait Gallery.  I understand the theory but I don't agree with it, They can only ever be as good as the photograph, for me they really show up how the photograph has super-ceded painting as representation and make the act of painting look like pointless nostalgia .  The portrait painting from the photograph is similar to the huge number of copies of paintings made to disseminate the likeness of Elizabeth I. The serve a purpose where a sitting would be infeasible, but they are always a painting of a photograph of a person rather than a painting of a person.

The next question is "what is wrong with that?"