Photorealism is a 1970s painting movement that used photographs as source material to produce paintings of extraordinary photographic precision.
Photorealism (also called Hyperrealism or Superrealism in some accounts) emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a movement of painters who took photographs as their direct source material and reproduced them on canvas with painstaking precision. The dealer Louis K. Meisel coined the term in 1968. The principal figures included Richard Estes, whose paintings of New York shop fronts and parked cars made the city's reflective surfaces into shimmering mosaics; Chuck Close, who built grid-based portraits the size of billboards from passport photographs; Audrey Flack, who specialised in still lifes of cosmetics, fruit, and religious objects; and Robert Bechtle and Ralph Goings, who painted the suburban landscapes of California. The movement was both a continuation of Pop Art's interest in mass-media imagery and a reaction against the gestural and abstract orientations of the 1950s and 1960s. Critics divided sharply: some saw a renewed mastery of the painted observation lost in modern art; others saw a slick photographic technique evacuated of pictorial intelligence. The movement's second wave from the 1990s onward — including Yigal Ozeri and the contemporary 'Hyperrealists' — has continued the project with digital photographic sources.