Photorealism
フォトリアリズム / 1968–1980s / Style / Postwar American Art
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.
At a glance
Visual 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
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
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Dictionary entry
- Type
- Let lettering appear inside the frame as signage, never laid over the image from outside
- Composition
- Keep the photograph's own crop and do not recompose the frame
- Material
- Paint grain and fringing into a surface smoothed of every brushmark, letting no substrate texture show
- 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.
- Further study
- Airbrush technique and grid transfer / The presentation at documenta 5 in 1972 / The role of the photograph as an intermediary term
Related entries
- Pop Art (ポップアート)Editorially linked for a useful contrast.Compare Photorealism and Pop Art
- Tableau Photography (タブロー写真)Editorially linked for a useful contrast.Compare Photorealism and Tableau Photography
More from Postwar American Art
Continue through styles in the same Postwar American Art family, prioritised by shared effects.
- Conceptual Art (コンセプチュアル・アート)Shared effects: Trust.
- Neo-Dada (ネオ・ダダ)Shared effects: Technique.
- Pictures Generation (ピクチャーズ・ジェネレーション)Shared effects: Trust.
Browse all Postwar American Art entries
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- https://indexstyle.org/styles/photorealism
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