What the thing is
Photorealism is a painting movement defined by reproducing photographs with high precision using mechanical or semi-mechanical transfer methods.
In its wider sense it is a genre in which an artist studies a photograph and tries to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium; the movement is the American painters who began in the late 1960s. Louis K. Meisel coined the word in 1969, and it first appeared in print in 1970 in a Whitney Museum catalogue for the show “Twenty-two Realists”. Other labels include Super-Realism, New Realism, Sharp Focus Realism and hyperrealism. Critics of the 1970s and 1980s often compared it to trompe-l’oeil, a wrongly attributed comparison: trompe-l’oeil tries to fool the eye, while a viewer of a Photorealist painting is always aware it is a painting.
Where it came from
It emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, evolving from Pop Art.
By the 1950s, modernist critics and Abstract Expressionism had minimalized realism as a serious undertaking. The Photorealists shared some aspects with American realists such as Edward Hopper but tried to set themselves as much apart from them as from the Abstract Expressionists, and they were much more influenced by Pop artists. Both Pop Art and Photorealism reacted to the overwhelming abundance of photographic media. Pop artists were mainly pointing out the absurdity of much of the imagery, especially commercial; the Photorealists were trying to reclaim and exalt the value of an image. Their open use of photographs drew intense criticism when the movement gained momentum, although visual devices had aided artists since the fifteenth century. Meisel argues that artists of earlier movements also used photographs as source material but went to great lengths to deny it, fearing their work would be taken for imitation.
What it gets right
It treats the photograph as a tool, not a subject. It foregrounds mechanical transfer—grid, projection, tracing—as part of the artistic act.
In the method, the artist photographs the subject, usually onto a slide, and then systematically transfers the image to canvas, either by projecting the slide or with traditional grid techniques. The results are often direct copies of the photograph but larger than the original, and the style is tight and precise, favouring subjects that demand virtuosity such as reflections in specular surfaces and the geometric rigor of man-made environments. Meisel’s five-point definition, written two years later at the request of the collector Stuart Speiser, also required that the artist had exhibited as a Photo-Realist by 1972 to count as one of the central Photo-Realists, and had devoted at least five years to the work.
What it gets wrong
It insists on fidelity to photographic detail while rejecting illusionistic deception, yet offers no critical stance toward the photograph’s inherent biases or omissions.
The first generation included Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Chuck Close, Audrey Flack and Robert Bechtle, often working independently with widely different starting points. They routinely tackled mundane or familiar subjects in traditional genres: landscapes, mostly urban rather than natural, portraits and still lifes. The sculptors Duane Hanson and John DeAndrea, who made painted, lifelike figures of average people, are also associated with the movement and are called Verists.
Why it matters now
It prefigures today’s debates about AI image generation: what counts as authorship when the camera and machine mediate perception?
The movement did not end with its first generation. Its height was the 1970s, and only eight of the original thirteen were still making Photorealist work in 2002; as of September 2020, Richard Estes was the only one still active in the style. It has also left the United States. The 1982 “Superhumanism” exhibition in New York introduced British painters to a wider American audience, and European artists such as Franz Gertsch, from the 1980s, and Clive Head have since been associated with it. Newer, more precise cameras and digital equipment have produced work sometimes called Hyperrealism.
Is it worth your time
Yes—if you want to understand how photographic mediation reshaped painting’s purpose in late-20th-century America.
