Photorealism vs Pop Art
フォトリアリズム / ポップアート
Photorealism comes from Postwar American Art and Pop Art from Pop. They are reached for with different intent, which is the fastest way to tell them apart.
Photorealism
A movement that transfers the photograph itself onto the canvas, rebuilding by hand the quantity of information a mechanical eye records. Shop-window reflections, the warp of chrome, diner neon: the subject is fixed on the surface together with the photograph's own focus, grain and chromatic fringing. What is painted is not what was seen but the fact that a camera saw it that way.
Pop Art
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Amplifies the vocabulary of ads and comics until mass culture itself becomes the picture.
| Photorealism | Pop Art | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1968–1980s | 1950s–1960s |
| Family | Postwar American Art | Pop |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Reflections and highlights taken from the photograph / Depth of field painted exactly as the lens gave it / Commercial subjects drawn from the city / A smooth surface with every brushmark erased | Halftone dots / Bold outlines / Primary colors / Repetition |
| Best used for | Advertising for cars and watches where the reflections in chrome and glass are the subject · Books and features on the city and consumer culture that keep the information a mechanical eye records | Making products and campaigns pop instantly · Boldly reinterpreting familiar subjects |
| Type | Let lettering appear inside the frame as signage, never laid over the image from outside | Comic-style extra-bold lettering |
| Composition | Keep the photograph's own crop and do not recompose the frame | Blow up the subject; panels and repetition |
| Material | Paint grain and fringing into a surface smoothed of every brushmark, letting no substrate texture show | Red, yellow, blue, black outlines, halftones |
| Caution | Cleaning up the lens artefacts: polish out the focus fall-off, the grain and the fringing and the picture stops reading as a photograph made by hand, leaving airless illustration. | Overusing comic marks trivializes the content. Decide what you treat as mass culture. |