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. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with different intent, which is the fastest way to tell them apart.

Photorealism

Photorealism — Ralph Goings《サクラメント空港》— Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0Photorealism — ジョン・ベーダー《John's Diner with John's Chevelle》2007年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0Photorealism — ヤン・アンダース・ネルソン《American Landscape》1975〜1976年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0

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

Pop Art — Andy Warhol《キャンベル・スープ缶》MoMA 展示 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0Pop Art — Roy Lichtenstein《Brushstrokes》ポートランド美術館 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0Pop Art — Roy Lichtenstein《バルセロナの頭》1992 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 ES

Amplifies the vocabulary of ads and comics until mass culture itself becomes the picture.

PhotorealismPop Art
Era1968–1980s1950s–1960s
FamilyPostwar American ArtPop
KindStyleStyle
CuesReflections 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 erasedHalftone dots / Bold outlines / Primary colors / Repetition
Best used forAdvertising 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 recordsMaking products and campaigns pop instantly · Boldly reinterpreting familiar subjects
TypeLet lettering appear inside the frame as signage, never laid over the image from outsideComic-style extra-bold lettering
CompositionKeep the photograph's own crop and do not recompose the frameBlow up the subject; panels and repetition
MaterialPaint grain and fringing into a surface smoothed of every brushmark, letting no substrate texture showRed, yellow, blue, black outlines, halftones
CautionCleaning 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.

Put these two together

Postwar American Art ／ Pop

IndexStyle