# Photorealism (フォトリアリズム)

> 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.

- IndexStyle No.480 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/photorealism
- Kind: Style · Family: Postwar American Art · Era: 1968–1980s
- Mood: Technology, Futurism, Trust
- Color cues: #e9e6dd / #67635d / #171615 (cues taken from reference works, not a fixed palette)

## Defining characteristics

- 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

- 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

## Research method

This entry records a historical style; derive the treatment from its sources rather than a fixed recipe:

- A neutral grotesque set small and cold, used as caption rather than headline so the image keeps all the voltage.
- One frontal image cropped so the principal reflection falls at the optical centre, with type confined to a single band at the edge.
- High-gloss stock or an untextured screen, ink laid perfectly smooth so no substrate grain competes with the photographic grain inside the image.

## What to avoid

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.

## Application checklist

Before calling a piece an application of this style, check it against the defining characteristics:

- [ ] 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
- [ ] At least one reference work below has been studied directly
- [ ] The caution above ("What to avoid") has been addressed

## Related styles

- **Pop Art (ポップアート)** — Amplifies the vocabulary of ads and comics until mass culture itself becomes the picture. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/pop-art
- **Staged Photography (演出写真)** — Composes scene, figure, props and light before the shutter, shaking the very premise that photographs record reality. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/staged-photography

## Further study

- Airbrush technique and grid transfer
- The presentation at documenta 5 in 1972
- The role of the photograph as an intermediary term

## Reference works

- Ralph Goings《サクラメント空港》— Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ralph%20Goings%20-%20Sacramento%20Airport.jpg

## Source of record

- Tate — Art Terms: Photorealism — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/photorealism

## Machine surfaces

- JSON: https://indexstyle.org/api/styles/photorealism
- Image-generation prompt (legally clean): https://indexstyle.org/styles/photorealism/prompt.txt
- MCP: https://indexstyle.org/mcp (tools: search_styles, get_style, compose_styles; prompts: image-prompt, apply-style)

## 日本語

写真をそのまま絵画へ移し替え、機械の眼が捉えた情報量を手で再現する運動。ショーウィンドウの反射、クロームの歪み、ダイナーのネオンといった被写体が、写真特有のピント・粒状・色収差ごと画布に定着される。「見たまま」ではなく「写真がそう写した」ことを描く。

特徴: 写真由来の反射とハイライト／被写界深度をそのまま描く／都市の商業的な被写体／筆跡を消した平滑な表面
注意: 表面的な記号へ還元せず、時代・地域・技術・制作主体の文脈を確認する。