Photorealistic

About

Photorealism emerged in the United States in the late 1960s, when painters began copying photographs openly, often projecting slides or gridding prints onto canvas. Rather than hiding the camera, they reproduced its traits: reflections, even focus, the flattening of distance. Richard Estes painted New York shopfronts crowded with reflections in glass; Robert Bechtle and Ralph Goings favoured parked cars, suburban houses and diners in California; Audrey Flack built dense still lifes from colour slides, as in Marilyn (Vanitas) (1977). The movement grew up beside Pop art and shared its taste for ordinary subjects.

Chuck Close pushed scale, making Big Self-Portrait (1967–68) more than two and a half metres tall from a single photograph. Later hyperrealists added detail beyond what any camera records. Close up, brushwork often vanishes, yet choices of cropping, focus and colour show a painter's decisions that a camera alone would not make.