The history of photorealism

I. photography and art

a) Camara obscura and Vermeer

b) the invention of the daguerreotype and “the end of painting”

there is an anecdote about a painter’s reaction to the advent of photography:

Paul Delaroche saw the first daguerreotype in 1839, he famously exclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!"

-the movement toward abstraction

As photography became more widespread and began to rival painting in giving people access to representational images, artists began in earnest to think of the act of painting as an expression of something more than pure translation. The culmination of this was in expressionism and finally abstract expressionism.

-dominance of abstract expressionism in US

American abstract expressionism of the 1950s played an important part in defining an American art independent from Europe.

(however, scholars often cite the Realist movement of the 1930s as the first important movement to break away from the European tradition)

II. realism

-reaction to abstraction; development of photorealism

The parent movement of photorealism is arguably the 1930s Realist movement and especially important are artists such as Hopper. These artists had no formal relationship to photography but their works often evoke the same atmosphere and dedication to extremely realistic images. Photorealism developed in the late 1960s and the term was first used in print by Louis Meisel, a New York art dealer. There are other terms such as superrealism used in the UK or hyper-realism.

Another movement that influenced photorealism is Pop Art. Think of the novel uses of photographic images in art such as the silk screening of photographs onto canvas done by artists like Warhol and Rauschenberg. http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/CollectionDatabase_ImageView.cfm?id=13700&theme=m_c

Especially in Warhol’s work, images of extremely ordinary things are made iconic through the process of art making, just as photorealist works generally tend to do.

Definitions

a type of realist painting whose content is based on photographs or, better, a photographic way of seeing (4)

a leading seventies’ style of trompe-l’oeil illusionism that vies with phorography itself in duplicating and documenting the external world. (5)

-photorealism’s complex relationship to both photography (representation) and painting (expression and often abstraction)

a) can be seen as abstraction-in that the subject is often utterly devoid of meaning

b) photorealism seems, on the surface, to be about exact representation, but photorealists often make composition changes and the Bay-Area photorealists bring the whole frame into focus unlike a photograph.

c) this interview by the Modern Art Obsession blog highlights the vast range that photorealism might be thought to encompass.