Short answers, pulled from the story.
Photorealism is a genre of art, particularly painting, in which an artist studies a photograph and attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. It also refers to a specific American art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, characterized by technically precise, photograph-like painted imagery.
Louis K. Meisel coined the word Photorealism in 1969. It first appeared in print in 1970 in a Whitney Museum catalogue for the exhibition "Twenty-two Realists."
The first generation of American Photorealists includes Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Chuck Close, Charles Bell, Audrey Flack, Don Eddy, Denis Peterson, Robert Bechtle, Ron Kleemann, Richard McLean, John Salt, and Tom Blackwell.
Trompe-l'oeil painting tries to deceive the viewer into thinking they are seeing a real object rather than a painted one. In Photorealism, the viewer always remains aware they are looking at a painting; the goal is technical fidelity to photographic imagery, not optical illusion.
Photorealism began as an American movement but became international from the 1980s onward. The 1982 "Superhumanism" exhibition at the Arnold Katzen Gallery in New York introduced European photorealists to American audiences, and since the mid-1990s artists from Europe have been prominent in the movement.
As of September 2020, Richard Estes, born in 1932, is the only remaining original Photorealist still actively working in the Photorealist style.