Photo Realism: American Art Movement

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photo realism also called super realism, American art movement that began in the 1960s, in New York and California. Taking photograph as its inspiration. Photo realism painters created highly illusionistic images that referred to the reproduced mage, not nature. Photorealism was the production of images that deployed near microscopic detail to achieve the highest degree of representational verisimilitude possible. Using the photograph as the primary visual reference, artists such as Robert Bechtel, Charles Bell, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Richard Estes and Audrey Flack, painted with the goal of photographic actuation and often included technical or pictorial challenges with a focus on the surface such as glass, reflections or the effects of light. Photo realists use the camera or photographs to gather information. They may also rely on a mechanical device to transfer the image on to the canvas, like a projector. Though the artist still requires a high level of skill to compete the work. In some artists’ work the use of multiple photographic studies for each work transcended the limitations of the singular depth of field of conventional photography. several sculptors including the Americans Duane Hanson and John De Andrea, were also associated with this movement. Like painters who relied on …show more content…

Flack projected slides of opulent still life arrangements onto canvases to be painted, as well as updating the 17th century theme of Vanitas and reminding the viewers of the fleeting nature of material things. Close symmetrically transformed photographs of his friends into giant frontal portraits, initially in black and white and then in colour which began in 1970. He first put down a light pencil grip for scaling up the photographs and then sketched in the image with the airbrush; he finished the image by painting in

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