Who started photorealism?

Several artists are credited with starting photorealism. Its earliest practitioners include Richard Estes, Audrey Flack and Robert Bechtle.

Photorealism was informed by Pop art’s predilection for representational imagery, popular iconography and tools, like projectors and airbrushes, borrowed from the worlds of commercial art and design. The movement is seen as a direct challenge to Abstract Expressionism’s subjectivity and gestural vigor.

The virtues of the “photo” in Photorealist art — infused as they are with dazzling qualities that are easily blurred in reproduction — are as elusive as they are allusive. “Much Photorealist painting has the vacuity of proportion and intent of an idiot-savant, long on look and short on personal timbre,” John Arthur wrote (rather admiringly) in the catalogue essay for Realism/Photorealism, a 1980 exhibition at the Philbrook Museum of Art, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At its best, Photorealism is a perpetually paused tug-of-war between the sacred and the profane, the general and the specific, the record and the object.

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