Thoughts: Photorealism

Photorealism is a truly amazing moment in the history of Western painting during which artists, in a variant of Realism, based their paintings on photographs. Occurring during the late 1960s in the United States and somewhat in Europe, artists focused on photographs and photographic advertisements that showed items of popular culture and consumption, esp. cars.

Scholars of Photorealism have focused on the movement's connection to Pop art (it its focus on pop culture), to the tradition of realism (both stylistically and in its reflection of the new American consumer landscape), and to the rise of the popularity of the snapshot camera. It has been suggested that Photorealism reflects the banality of the landscape despite the fact that some artists actually painted photographs of members of their family (very un-banal subjects).


All of this is most likely true. However, I was thinking that one thing that I don't believe has been discussed is what the act of painting a photograph says about "the photographic." What I mean is that to take a snapshot photo in the late sixties is to "snap" an image...it is over in a second. It captures and freezes a moment, eternalizing it for the length of the existence of the film or printed photo--this comment isn't new, it's standard in the history of photography. To translate a photograph into a painting is to slow down the photographic moment even further and to preserve it to an even higher degree on the more indestructible medium of canvas. The gesture is by turns boring, neurotic, loving, and even fetishistic. If loving, the photographic is conceptualized as insufficient at extracting and preserving. If boring or neurotic, it is seen as is incomprehensible, necessitating obsessive repetition.

Also interesting is that Photorealism, while compounding the freezing element of the photographic, acts in a reverse direction. It takes place in time. It thereby reinserts the synchronic photograph back into the diachronic. Photorealism, at least that of artists like Robert Bechtle or Richard Estes, thus re-animates the dead photograph, resisting its pull, and yielding something even more unyielding. It is thus a kind of exercise of and on futility.




Photo: Robert Bechtle, '61 Pontiac, 1968-69. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with funds from the Richard and Dorothy Rogers Fund © Robert Bechtle