Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Photorealism art movement began in the late 1960s when American painters started creating work that challenged dominant art movements. Louis K. Meisel coined the word Photorealism in 1969, and it appeared in print for the first time in 1970 within a Whitney Museum catalogue.
To be considered a central Photo-Realist, an artist needed to have exhibited work as a Photo-Realist by 1972 and devote at least five years to developing and exhibiting Photo-Realist work. The definition also required using the camera and photograph to gather information and employing mechanical or semi-mechanical means to transfer that information onto canvas.
The first generation included painters like 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. These artists tackled mundane or familiar subjects ranging from urban landscapes to portraits and still lifes.
Photorealist artists gathered imagery using cameras and photographs before beginning any work on canvas, often projecting slides directly onto the surface. Critics reacted with intense disapproval because they argued that reliance on mechanical reproduction undermined the value of human creativity.
Second-generation painters include John Baeder, Hilo Chen, Jack Mendenhall, Ken Marschall, David Parrish, and Idelle Weber. The introduction of these European painters to a wider US audience occurred through the 1982 Superhumanism exhibition at the Arnold Katzen Gallery in New York.
As of September 2020, Richard Estes remained the only original Photorealist actively working in the style. The evolution of technology brought forth photorealistic paintings referred to as Hyperrealism, which use digital tools and media beyond standard paint to achieve greater precision.