Photo-realism

Photo-realism, American art movement that began in the 1960s, taking photography as its inspiration. Photo-realist painters created highly illusionistic images that referred not to nature but to the reproduced image. Artists such as Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, Robert Bechtle, and Chuck Close attempted to reproduce what the camera could record. Several sculptors, including the Americans Duane Hanson and John De Andrea, were also associated with this movement. Like the painters, who relied on photographs, the sculptors cast from live models and thereby achieved a simulated reality.

Photo-realism grew out of the Pop and Minimalism movements that preceded it. Like Pop artists, the Photo-realists were interested in breaking down hierarchies of appropriate subject matter by including everyday scenes of commercial life—cars, shops, and signage, for example. Also like them, the Photo-realists drew from advertising and commercial imagery. The Photo-realists’ use of an industrial or mechanical technique such as photography as the foundation for their work in order to create a detached and impersonal effect also had an affinity with both Pop and Minimalism. Yet many saw Photo-realism’s revival of illusionism as a challenge to the pared-down Minimalist aesthetic, and many perceived the movement as an attack on the important gains that had been made by modern abstract painting.

Photo-realists typically projected a photographed image onto a canvas and then used an airbrush to reproduce the effect of a photo printed on glossy paper. Estes claimed that the idea of the painting was involved primarily with the photograph and that the painting was just the technique of finishing it up. He chose to disguise the painterliness of his New York street scenes with the look of photography. Goings and Bechtle also sought to capture a crisp veneer by using an airbrush technique in their many images of the pervasive American car culture. Flack projected slides of opulent still-life arrangements onto canvases to be painted, thus updating the 17th-century theme of vanitas and reminding viewers of the fleeting nature of material things. Close systematically transformed photographs of his friends into giant frontal portraits, initially in black-and-white and then in colour beginning in 1970. He first put down a light pencil grid for scaling up the photograph and then sketched in the image with the airbrush; he finished the image by painting in the details.