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.
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
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Product imagery of chrome, glass and liquid that must read as photographed rather than illustrated, where a rendering has to acquire lens behaviour to be believed · Editorial and campaign work about consumer culture, where the gloss on the surface is itself the argument
- Type
- A neutral grotesque set small and cold, used as caption rather than headline so the image keeps all the voltage.
- Composition
- One frontal image cropped so the principal reflection falls at the optical centre, with type confined to a single band at the edge.
- Material
- High-gloss stock or an untextured screen, ink laid perfectly smooth so no substrate grain competes with the photographic grain inside the image.
- 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