Photorealism

Photorealism emerged in the United States in the late 1960s as a deliberate turn away from Abstract Expressionism. Where the previous generation had made the artist's gesture the subject, these painters worked from photographs and suppressed the brushmark almost entirely. The dealer Louis K. Meisel named the movement in 1969 and set criteria for it: the artist uses a camera to gather the information, uses mechanical or semi-mechanical means to transfer it to the canvas, and has the technical skill to make the result read as photographic.

Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, curated by Harald Szeemann, put the Americans in front of a European audience and made the movement international news. Richard Estes painted plate-glass storefronts in which the reflection is more legible than whatever sits behind it. Ralph Goings found monumentality in diner counters, pickup trucks and condiment bottles. Robert Bechtle painted parked cars on Bay Area streets in flat, unhelpful daylight. Audrey Flack built dense vanitas still lifes, and with Marilyn (Vanitas) in 1977 became the first photorealist whose painting entered the Museum of Modern Art's collection. Chuck Close gridded photographs of faces up to wall scale.

The movement is routinely confused with hyperrealism, which came later and pushes past the photograph into a heightened version of it. Photorealism is the stricter proposition: match the source, including its flatness, its banal light and its uninteresting crop. What carries into contemporary design is that discipline rather than the subject matter, and it has become newly legible now that a convincing photographic image costs nothing to produce.