Photorealism

This article is about the art movement. In computer graphics, the phrase "photorealism" is used to describe photorealistic rendering of scenes.

Photorealism is the genre of painting resembling a photograph, most recently seen in the splinter hyperrealism movement. However, the term is primarily applied to paintings from the photorealism art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As a full-fledged art movement, photorealism sprang up in the late 1960s and early 1970s in America (where it was also commonly labeled superrealism, new realism and sharp focus realism) and was dominated by painters. The term Photorealism was first coined by New York City art dealer Louis K. Meisel. The first generation of American photorealists includes such painters as Richard Estes, John Baeder, Denis Peterson, John Mandel, Robert Bechtle, Audrey Flack, Don Eddy, Joseph Michetti, Chuck Close, Ralph Goings, and Richard McLean. Duane Hanson was a rare exception of a photorealistic sculptor, famous for his amazingly lifelike painted sculptures of average people, complete with simulated hair and real clothes. Often working independently of each other and with widely different starting points, photorealists routinely tackled mundane or familiar subjects in traditional art genres--landscapes (mostly urban rather than naturalistic), portraits, and still lifes.

Photorealists very consciously took their cues from photographic images, often working very systematically from photographic slide projections onto canvases and using techniques such as gridding to preserve accuracy. The photorealist style is tight and precise, often with an emphasis on imagery that requires a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate, such as reflections in specular surfaces and the geometric (geometry) rigor of man-made environs.

Although predominantly an American movement, in the early 2000s a group of European hyperrealist artists began to emerge. Although the American tradition of Photorealism is a frame of reference, they incorporate more detailed references in their work. See Jean Olivier Hucleux, Gerard Schlosser, François Bricq, Gilles Esnault or Jacques Bodin.

20th century photorealism can be contrasted with the similarly literal style found in trompe l'oeil paintings of the 19th century. However, trompe l'oeil paintings tended to be carefully designed, very shallow-space still-lifes with illusionistic gimmicks such as objects seeming to lift slightly from the painting. The photorealism movement moved beyond this double-take illusionism to tackle deeper spatial representations (e.g. urban landscapes) and took on much more varied and dynamic subject matter.