Photorealism

• 1. Introduction

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  Photorealism asks a deceptively simple question: can a painting be mistaken for a photograph? The answer, it turns out, is almost beside the point. When artists first admitted in the late 1960s that they were working directly from photographs, the art world was outraged. Critics leveled accusations of imitation and trickery. Yet visual devices had been aiding painters since the fifteenth century. The real scandal was not the method but the honesty.

  The term Photorealism itself was coined by Louis K. Meisel in 1969 and appeared in print for the first time in 1970, in a Whitney Museum catalogue for the show "Twenty-two Realists." What started as a distinctly American movement would, by the 2000s, draw practitioners from Prague to London, Zurich to Monaco, expanding into something no single dealer or critic could define or contain.

• 2. Birth From Reaction

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  Abstract Expressionism dominated American art by the 1950s, and modernist critics had largely pushed realism to the margins as a serious pursuit. Into that climate, Photorealism emerged not as a nostalgic revival but as a pointed rebuttal. It grew alongside Pop Art, sharing with it a debt to the explosion of photographic media that had flooded mid-twentieth-century culture.

  The two movements read that flood differently. Pop artists pointed at the absurdity of commercial imagery. Photorealists chose instead to reclaim and exalt what a photographic image could mean. Edward Hopper represented one kind of American realism; Photorealists deliberately distanced themselves from that tradition too, positioning their work against both the abstraction they rejected and the older representational schools they were not willing to simply continue.

  Louis K. Meisel, writing and lecturing on the subject, identified three consequences photography brought to art after its invention in the nineteenth century: it displaced portrait and scenic painters, driving many into photography as a profession; it supplied source material that artists used but publicly denied for fear their work would be read as mere imitation; and it opened avenues for experimentation that would have been impossible before. The arrival of Photorealism in the late 1960s was, in Meisel's framing, the culmination of that long reckoning.

• 3. What Counts as Photorealist

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  Stuart M. Speiser commissioned a large collection of works by Photorealists, and Louis K. Meisel developed a five-point definition in response to that commission. The collection later traveled as "Photo-Realism 1973: The Stuart M. Speiser Collection" and was donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1978.

  Meisel's definition required that the Photo-Realist use a camera and photograph to gather information, and that the transfer of that information to canvas be done by mechanical or semi-mechanical means. The finished work had to appear photographic. Crucially, the artist had to have exhibited Photorealist work by 1972 to qualify as one of the central practitioners, and must have devoted at least five years to developing and showing such work. That last criterion made Photorealism one of the few art movements with a built-in durability test baked into its definition.

  Critics of the 1970s and 1980s often conflated Photorealism with trompe-l'oeil, but Meisel and others drew a firm line. Trompe-l'oeil painting tries to trick the eye into seeing a real object rather than a painted one. A Photorealist painting never conceals what it is; the viewer always knows they are looking at paint on canvas.

• 4. How the Work Gets Made

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  A slide projector or a traditional grid is often the first tool a Photorealist reaches for after the photograph is developed. The artist projects or grids the photographic slide onto the canvas, then transfers the image systematically. The resulting paintings are typically larger than the original photograph or slide.

  That enlargement is where technical virtuosity becomes visible. Reflections in specular surfaces, the geometry of windows and chrome, the precise rendering of man-made environments at scale: these are the subjects Photorealists return to repeatedly, because they are the hardest to fake and the most revealing of skill. The image must be frozen, since movement cannot be represented by working from a static photograph. Everything the painter shows is a moment held still.

  Since 2000, digital cameras and new equipment have pushed what is achievable. Newer paintings sometimes exceed what was once thought possible on canvas, and this strain of the work is often labeled Hyperrealism. Bill Fink has taken that evolution in an unusual direction, developing his own technique for creating photorealistic images using soil, pollen, human hair, and cremated human remains.

• 5. The Original Photorealists

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  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 form the first generation. They worked largely independently of one another, with widely different starting points, but shared a commitment to mundane and familiar subjects: urban landscapes rather than naturalistic ones, portraits, and still lifes.

  A second generation followed, including John Baeder, Hilo Chen, Jack Mendenhall, Ken Marschall, David Parrish, and Idelle Weber. These painters continued developing and refining the techniques the originators had established. Sculptors Duane Hanson and John DeAndrea joined the movement's orbit from a different angle, producing painted lifelike sculptures of ordinary people complete with simulated hair and real clothing. They are classified as Verists.

  By 2002, according to Meisel and Chase's "Photorealism at the Millennium," only eight of the original thirteen Photorealists were still producing work in the style. As of September 2020, Richard Estes, born in 1932, remained the only original Photorealist still actively working in the Photorealist manner.

• 6. Going Global

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  The 1982 exhibition "Superhumanism" at the Arnold Katzen Gallery in New York introduced European photorealists including Mike Gorman and Eric Scott to a wider American audience. That show marked an early signal that the movement would not remain confined to its American origins.

  Franz Gertsch began working in photorealist approaches in the 1980s. Since the mid-1990s, artists including Clive Head, Raphaella Spence, Bertrand Meniel, and Roberto Bernardi have emerged as European figures associated with the movement. The Prague Project brought American and non-American photorealist painters together to work in cities including Prague, Zurich, Monaco, and New York.

  Newer practitioners build on the specific legacies of the founders: Anthony Brunelli shows the influence of Richard Estes; Glennray Tutor reflects the influence of Ralph Goings and Charles Bell. The 2014 book "Hyperreal," published by Juxtapoz, documented current trends within the genre, a sign that the conversation around photorealism continues to attract new readers and new artists well into the twenty-first century.