The Theory of Everything or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Photorealism
I have never thought of myself as a photorealist. My paintings are impressionistic, not sharp focus, and I chafe at the ego in rendering so that a painting might be mistaken for a photograph. When Anna Katz asked me to be in Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, I was surprised by my inclusion, and I had initial reservations about tying my work to a history that always felt so restrictive—macho, white, egocentric. Yet there is something undeniable about the idea of photorealism, a parallel Kodachrome reality where we visualize our shining world and organize our sun-drenched memories. Today, even more than in the 1960s, cameras permeate our lives, but it is not by accident that the idea of photorealism comes from painting not photography. To understand images—our mediated reality—one must explore the history of the relationship between painting and photography. In so doing, we can construct a more expansive photorealism, one that could even include my work.
To expand the idea of photorealism, it is best to begin with its history and move outward. Louis Meisel, New York gallerist, supposedly coined the term photorealism in 1968 as a marketing umbrella for the contemporary realist painters he was representing. Meisel acknowledges that while movements were once formed by small cohorts of artists working together to forge a shared position, photorealism was instead a moniker he imposed on a group of disparate artists. His photorealists didn’t know each other; they didn’t share ideas or values; and many of them actively rejected the label. Yet the idea was successful as a marketing strategy. Major museums bought the works, curators mounted photorealist exhibitions, and the word persists today in catalogues, websites, and museum surveys—most defining the movement in Meisel’s terms.
In his most succinct definition of a photorealist, Meisel writes, “a photo-realist [is] an artist that use[s] a camera instead of a sketch pad, transfer[s] images to the painting surface by means of a grid or projector, and ha[s] the technical ability to make a painting look photographic.” He then centered the movement around thirteen artists: Robert Bechtle, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, Ron Kleemann, Richard McLean, John Salt, and Ben Schonzeit. They are all white. They are all American, except for the English John Salt who was living in the United States. They are all men, except for Audrey Flack, and the preponderance of shiny engines, motorcycles, and cars grounds Meisel’s photorealism in a masculine sensibility (fig. 1).
This canonical list of artists is a natural starting point in any effort to expand photorealism. Narrow, exclusive, and circumscribed by Meisel’s own interests, this core group demands reconsideration. For instance, many notable artists of the time meet Meisel’s criteria for photorealists, but are still left out of his version of the history. Where is Malcolm Morley? Where are the Europeans, Gerhard Richter and Franz Gertsch? What of other women artists like Janet Fish, Sylvia Mangold, and Vija Celmins? If there is room in Meisel’s movement for a more conceptual artist like Chuck Close, why not John Baldessari? By 1980, when Meisel published his definitive book on the movement, the absence of any one of these artists (and many others) would have struck many as an obvious omission. Centering a movement on a small group of great white American men always felt at best dated and at worst bigoted. Yet even more troubling than the demographics are the economics. Meisel represented most of the artists he deemed core photorealists, and he exhibited and sold works by the rest of the thirteen. A gallerist creating an entire movement around artists from whom he garners financial gain begs the question: Is photorealism a real and compelling cultural idea or just a convenient marketing term?
Beyond the artist list, Meisel’s version of photorealism needs updating as it is based on a now invalidated understanding of art history. According to Meisel, Robert Bechtle invented photorealism in 1963 when took a picture of a station wagon outside his studio window and painted it: “That’s the very first true photorealist painting.” Except it wasn’t. Artists have been painting from photographs since the invention of photography in 1839. For example, Thomas Eakins, who many of the photorealists cite as an inspiration, made his hyperrealist paintings with the same project-and-trace method as Bechtle (and myself for that matter), just with older technology (figs. 2, 3). And if we expand our definition of photography to include core photographic technologies, like lenses, mirrors, and projections, then artists have been working with “photography” for centuries.
The suggestion that painters employed photographic techniques long before the sixties has been bubbling up for years, but only recently has it cemented into accepted fact. Aaron Scharf’s Art and Photography, which lays out the argument that painting and photography have been entwined since the Renaissance, was published in 1968 (fig. 4). Yet, Scharf’s work was slow to catch on. Artists themselves were cagey and secretive about their working methods, especially where photography was concerned, and the public was slow to revise its romantic notions about a pure and uninfluenced painting. Yet in recent years, as imaging technologies have advanced, scans and chemical analyses have given us greater access to the true working methods of painters. Today, it is impossible to ignore the long-standing relationship between painting and photographic practices. Yet the tipping point in the general acceptance of photography’s use in painting came at the Hockney- Falco symposium in 2001. That night began the unraveling of photorealism as we know it.
I was there, standing outside on the streets of New York City, with crowds of people unable to get into a packed NYU auditorium. I would be hard-pressed to name an art talk with more fanfare before or since. David Hockney and the physicist Charles Falco presented claims about how the hard-focus painters of the canon (Caravaggio, van Eyck, Vermeer, Ingres) all employed camera obscura and camera lucida— projection-and-trace technologies—to aid in their near photographic works. Hockney took his argument to the birth of realism in the early 1400s, claiming the rise of camera technology coincided with a rise in realism in painting—that camera technology engendered realism. Though he focused on Western art, his thesis that there would be no realism without the invention of the camera obscura can be applied globally. At the time, that sounded radical. No realism without photography—it is a compelling argument with tantalizing supporting facts, like the overabundance of left-handed drinkers in early realist paintings (caused by the mirroring in lens refraction). However, some in the audience were not ready to relinquish the more romantic version of painting. Several art historians offered dramatic, absurd, and illogical rebuttals. Keith Christiansen of the Metropolitan Museum described his experiment with a concave mirror purchased at a Duane Reade pharmacy only to declare it impossible to render photographically with such a device; Susan Sontag mocked the British-born Hockney as “very American” for reading the past through the present, or Warholizing art; and Linda Nochlin stormed the stage with her wedding dress, declaring “this is what I call scientific evidence.”
Nochlin’s argument is indicative of the myopic thinking of many of Hockney’s detractors. Philip Pearlstein had painted a portrait of Nochlin wearing her blue and white wedding dress (fig. 5). She brought the dress onstage at the symposium to compare it the painting. Since she had watched Pearlstein make the work, she exclaimed that she could prove Pearlstein hadn’t used a camera in his exacting rendering of the dress and its patterning. So what? It doesn’t matter which artists used or didn’t use cameras; the point is some did. Maybe Pearlstein didn’t use photographic techniques, but Vermeer did (fig. 6). Just because you prove one artist didn’t use photographic technology, it doesn’t follow that none did, or that every artist was equally affected by the existence of cameras. Photography is a specific way of seeing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. Camera technology has been with humans for so long that even Pearlstein’s brain was fundamentally altered by growing up in a photography-saturated world. This is the exact point Nochlin herself made in her 1968 catalogue on new realism: “Pearlstein . . . transformed himself into a camera, and assimilated many of the characteristics normally associated with photography, such as arbitrary cropping, the close up, and radical disjunction of scale.” You can’t unlearn a cropped photo, or a motion blur, or a focal softening, and you can’t unlearn 500 years of art history built on photographic aesthetics that stretch back to the camera obscura. All realist paintings were and are influenced by photography, and that was as true for Pearlstein as it was for Vermeer. So if, like Hockney conjectures, there is no realism without photography—that realism is by nature the portrayal of the photographic world— then all realism is photorealism. The terms realism and photorealism could be interchangeable, and to start some history of a photorealism in the mid-twentieth century is to misread the entire formative relationship between realism and camera technology.
Hockney-Falco took their argument back to the fifteenth century, but we could go back even further. The earliest known writings about the camera obscura date to fourth-century BCE China, and use of the camera obscura was widespread there and in the Middle East long before it arrived in Europe just before the Renaissance. Or we could go back to the beginning. Matt Gatton, a scholar of ancient photography, builds re-creations of Paleolithic tents and caves to show how small holes in animal hides or rocks functioned like a pinhole camera, projecting ghostly images of people, landscapes, and animals onto tent and cave walls. Whereas Hockney theorized that realism in painting follows advances in camera and lens technology, Gatton’s work goes further, hypothesizing that the relationship between painting and photography itself is formative—that all two-dimensional art, including painting, is bound to the photographic fundamentals of refraction and reflection. His scholarship describes how accidental moments of pinhole projection might have changed human brains, introducing concepts of art, drawing, flatness, consciousness, philosophy, and spirituality. We know that the evolution of humanity turns on epiphanal moments of invention—fire, farming, the wheel, steel. It is not a stretch to suggest that painting might have come about similarly. Just as fire was an accident that grew human brains from added protein, so too the first blurry projection of a caribou on a tent wall may have kicked off 65,000 years of artistic mastery. In Hockney’s view, all realism is photorealism, but for Gatton there is no painting at all without the earliest manifestations of photography.
Gatton’s theory is forever unprovable, but I mention it here as a thought experiment to challenge assumptions about the chicken-and-egg nature of painting and photography, about which came first, and who influenced whom. Gatton’s work sheds light on what makes people so uncomfortable about the relationship between painting and photography, why historians were so up in arms at the Hockney symposium, and why some people are so quick to dismiss photorealism. If one accepts that photographic technologies (pinhole projections or camera obscuras or film cameras) have been formative influences on painting, then one must also accept that humans are more reactive than generative, that we are more automatons than free thinkers. This upends the central art-historical myth of the artist as a singular genius, as a godlike creator. Mimesis not genesis. Movements themselves are more responses to technological shifts than to ideological evolutions, like impressionism to the study of lenses, or futurism to the invention of cinema, or Pop to the proliferation of printing. Vermeer is as tied to the camera obscura as Warhol is to the silkscreen, or as Avery Singer is to the robotic plotter. None of these artists is any less dependent on a camera than Robert Bechtle.
We can problematize that photography isn’t unique to photorealism—that photography is embedded in all painting—but we can also problematize that reality isn’t unique to photorealism. It seems absurd to think a painting could be anything other than realist given that there is no consensus on what or where reality is. What do we mean when we say realism? A painting that looks like “reality”? But what does reality look like? For instance, photorealism is only more realist than abstract expressionism if you define reality as external and objective rather than internal and intuitive. In the 1960s, at the birth of photorealism, many movements laid equal claim to realism, based on differing ideas about the nature of reality. In 1962, Sidney Janis Gallery titled its landmark Pop exhibition New Realism, defining reality as mediated by the culture—social, historic, and economic; in 1968, MoMA mounted Art of the Real, a survey of minimalist painting and sculpture, defining reality as existing in the material and physical, outside of human subjectivity or representation; and in 1968, Nochlin mounted the first showing of photorealists in her Realism Now exhibition at Vassar, defining reality as tethered to subjective human consciousness. Each of these movements—Pop, minimalism, photorealism—was equally about exploring reality, and equally realist. Reality or nonreality is as false a binary as painting or photography.
So if photography is in all paintings and realism is in all paintings, then all paintings are photo/realist. Photorealism is just the essential nature of painting. Okay. I’m being a little naughty here, verging on nihilism. Maybe it’s easy to play semantics and mush it all together in a theory of everything as I’ve just done, but I do think the case for photorealism as a discrete movement is especially thin. For me, photorealism is one long continual narrative, stretching back to the caves of Lascaux (fig. 7), and this makes me like it more, not less. I’d rather be part of an infinite continuum with millions of artists across thousands of years than the king of an island of thirteen. However, there can still be chapters— a chapter that begins with the introduction of the camera obscura to Europe around 1200, or a chapter that begins with the invention of photography in 1839, or a chapter that begins with Robert Bechtle in 1963. Even if painting from a photograph wasn’t new in 1963, the context for that gesture was. By the 1960s, Kodak had sold millions of Brownie 127 cameras, basically creating the snapshot and the family photo album. Bechtle’s work was a distinct response to that technological shift and the Kodachrome moment that came with it. There isn’t Bechtle without the Brownie. The context for photo-based paintings has changed in 2024 too. We live surrounded by millions of images—photographs on countless surfaces, in infinite arrays. Google image search. Instagram. Billboards. Bus stops. Magazines. Movies. Websites. iPhones. Not only do we get most of our information from photography, we also socialize and construct our identities through image databases. Digital feeds represent our meta-identities. Social-media networks form the nexus of human interaction. iPhone photo libraries organize our brains, programming what we will remember about our lives. These photographic technologies change how our minds work. They change how we see and interact with the ever-receding real world. For example, do you experience a landscape slowly, in a panorama of the sublime, or do you see a landscape as fragmented and cropped, as the potential for a series of filtered Instagram posts? All of this is what I make my work about. I paint from photography as an attempt to understand how photographic images shape our consciousness and our world today. I paint from life, and if you’re painting from life in 2024, then there’s a good chance you’re painting from a photograph because most of us spend more time in front of screens than trees.
I think Robert Bechtle would have said some version of the same thing—that he was painting from life. Technology changes, context changes, how to paint from a photo changes, but the why is constant. The answer to that question—why paint from a photograph?—is a fixed universal across the history of painting. To paint from a photograph is to make images (whatever their contemporary form) the central subject of a work. Painting, by its nature, is especially suited to exploring the relationship between images and life. Bechtle talks about the difference between snapshot time and painting time, and I think that time is one reason why. Photographs are fast—the decisive moment, the instamatic. Photography doesn’t contain much time for introspection (and neither does life), but painting is slow. It can take hundreds of hours to make a large photorealistic painting. Each brushstroke—its length and rhythm—aggregates into a score with tempo and duration. Painting creates a deep-focus space where one can circulate inside of ideas, feelings, histories, and philosophies. Beyond its expansive time, painting also contains an innate subjectivity. While a photograph presents itself as an objective fact—a neutral observation—a painting is a metaphor for a subjective human consciousness. To paint from a photo, at any time in history, is to portray how imagery influences consciousness and what it means to be alive at a specific moment in time.
And why paint at all? I can answer that one for myself. Painting is a sacred human practice, a continuum reaching back to the caves, entangled with photography even at the start. There is an umbilical cord that stretches from the earliest drawing of a woman on a rock to me in my studio today. That’s a beautiful thought. Whenever I am beset by doubt or cynicism, I remember that my vocation is as primal as picking berries or screaming. Even now, above all else I could say, my work is just a bloody handprint on a cold cave wall. I was here. To engage in a practice that has been present across the entirety of human history is to feel a cord connecting me to every painter who ever lived past and future, and that’s humbling. From a Neanderthal woman to Johannes Vermeer to Robert Bechtle to me and to everyone else. In this version of history, I am totally a photorealist.
Notes
1 I say “supposedly” as it is Meisel who gives himself credit for the term, even though the descriptor photographic realism had been long in use. For example, the artist Edvard Munch said “photographic realism leaves one cold.” James McElhinney, “Oral History Interview with Louis Meisel,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, April 2009; Arne Eggum, Munch and Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 45.
2 Louis K. Meisel, Photo-Realism (New York: Abradale Press, 1980).
3 Meisel Oral History Interview, 2009; Martin Gayford, “Interviews: Getting Real with Richard Estes,” Apollo Magazine, November 28, 2021; Paul J. Karlstrom, “Oral History Interview with Robert Bechtle,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1978–80.
4 As early as 1980, major works of photorealism were already in collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Meisel, Photo-Realism, 24.
5 Ibid., 12.
6 Meisel (ibid., 241, 242) called Flack “the only woman among the dozen or so original Photo-Realists.” Yet he still felt the need to diminish her, saying that her work was “highly emotional,” a quality he once thought “antithetical” to photorealism. He later went further, saying that though she was one of the first and most important photorealists, she, like many women artists, “fell by the wayside for all of the reasons that people would say that women don’t make it.” Meisel Oral History Interview, 2009.
7 Meisel labels Morley a Pop artist not a photorealist (Photo-Realism, 14), but the distinction seems arbitrary and perhaps driven by the fact that Morley was represented elsewhere, at Kornblee Gallery, not incidentally run by a woman, Jill Kornblee.
8 Richter and Gertsch, both of whom would have been well known to Meisel, exhibited alongside Bechtle, Close, and Estes at Documenta 5, one of the first photorealism shows. Documenta 5: Befragung der Realität, Bildwelten heute: Kassel, 30. Juni bis 8. Oktober 1972, Neue Galerie Schöne Aussicht, Museum Fridericianum, Friedrichsplatz (Kassel: Documenta GmbH and C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1972).
9 By 1973, Celmins had been in major shows at MoMA and the Whitney Museum. Janet Fish, like Morley, was represented by Kornblee Gallery. Gary Garrels, ed., Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory (San Francisco: SFMOMA, 2018).
10 John Baldessari first exhibited his Commissioned Paintings, a series of photorealist works showing hands pointing at things, in 1970 at OK Harris, right around the corner from Meisel’s gallery, at a time when there were fewer than five galleries in SoHo. “Exhibition Schedules” by OK Harris Gallery, Box 3, Folder 33, Ivan C. Karp papers and OK Harris Works of Art gallery records, 1960–2014, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
11 Photorealism at the Parrish Museum, 2017, https://vimeo. com/252143181. Though elsewhere, Meisel credits Audrey Flack with inventing photorealism (Photo-Realism, 241).
12 While 1839, when Daguerre announced his method of fixing a photographic image, provides a convenient starting point, no one moment can be put to photography’s invention because it was an ever-evolving technology. Successful experiments with the chemistry date back to 1822 involving different inventors all over the world. The lens, refraction, and reflection devices that are at the heart of photography date back to at least 500 BCE, with many moments of innovation and improvement over the centuries. See M. Susan Barger and William B. White, The Daguerreotype: Nineteenth-Century Technology and Modern Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Sarah Kate Gillespie, The Early American Daguerreotype: Cross-Currents in Art and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016); Boris Kossoy, The Pioneering Photographic Work of Hercule Florence (New York: Routledge, 2018); David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, new and expanded ed. (New York: Viking Studio, 2006).
13 And only marginally different from how Vermeer made his paintings. See Kathleen A. Foster and Mark Bockrath, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (New Haven and Philadelphia: Yale University Press and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1997); Janet C. Bishop, Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective (San Francisco and Berkeley: SFMOMA and University of California Press, 2005); Bechtle Oral History Interview, 1978–80.
14 Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (New York: Penguin Books, 1968).
15 Thomas Eakins, for instance, denied any use of cameras or tracing during his lifetime. Even after his death, his wife continued to support his claim. It was almost a hundred years later, when his lost archives came to light, that scholars had access to his negatives and working methods, definitively proving that he had not only taken photos as reference material for paintings, but had also projected them onto his canvases by magic lantern. Foster and Bockrath, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered.
16 Hockney, Secret Knowledge.
17 Ibid.
18 Sarah Boxer, “Paintings Too Perfect? The Great Optics Debate,” The New York Times, December 4, 2001.
19 Jane Jelley, Traces of Vermeer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Laura J. Snyder, Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); Philip Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
20 Linda Nochlin, Realism Now (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Vassar College Art Gallery, 1968).
21 Matt Gatton, “First Light: Inside the Palaeolithic Camera Obscura,” in Acts of Seeing: Artists, Scientists and the History of the Visual, ed. Assimina Kaniari and Marina Wallace (London: Artakt & Zidane Press, 2009), 146–54.
22 The New Realists (New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1962); E. C. Goossen and Bernard Karpel, The Art of the Real: USA, 1948–1968 (New York: MoMA, 1968); Nochlin, Realism Now.
23 Is Chuck Close’s grid more real than Sol LeWitt’s? Is Robert Bechtle’s trace more real than Warhol’s?
24 Laurent Mannoni and Richard Crangle, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).
25 Marc Olivier, “George Eastman’s Modern Stone-Age Family: Snapshot Photography and the Brownie,” Technology and Culture 48, no. 1 (2007): 1–19.
26 I’ll add that most of the time we experience paintings as photographs of paintings, not as actual paintings.
27 Judith Richards, “Oral History Interview with Robert Bechtle,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, February 2010.
28 Every time I stand before a Richard Estes, I am floored by the time those paintings must have taken to paint. The experience of timescale in those paintings is akin to the experience of the sublime.
29 I’m invoking the idea of deep-focus from cinema studies. I think you could apply much of what André Bazin says about how deep-focus cinema functions to the kind of long and deep space created in a painting. For instance, Bazin describes how deep-focus space “brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality.” André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), vol. 1, 23–40.
30 Not to mention how moving it is to me personally that most of the cave paintings and painted handprints were likely made by women. Virginia Hughes, “Were the First Artists Mostly