To meticulously reproduce a photograph by hand is to know it most intimately—to pore over its details and devote inordinate amounts of time to re-creating a moment captured in a flash. Such exacting realism commits to the specificity of its subject, elevating its significance in turn. And yet, despite the level of care and determination relating to the practice, Photorealism has largely been looked down upon as cheap illusionism, slick eye candy, or conservative fluff in the art-historical canon of the past half century. Though long associated with crass commercialism and advertising, Photorealism’s easy legibility and apparent superficiality belie more complex depths. Turning purported deficits and liabilities into strengths, curator Anna Katz has staged a thoughtful reappraisal of American Photorealism, both as an historical movement (emerging in the late 1960s and ’70s, when cameras became widely available) and as an ongoing strategy prevalent among contemporary artists.
In “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968,” Katz undertakes a recuperative project, positioning Photorealism in its American flowering as an extension of progressive political impulses. The exhibition centers three aspects of Photorealism to characterize it as a populist modality: its skill-based labor and tradecraft pedigree, its focus on everyday people as an opportunity to increase visibility for underrepresented demographics, and its direct portrayal of urban grit and social inequities in a documentary fashion. It comes as no surprise that the exhibition argues for Photorealism as a prominent contribution to a historical trajectory leading into contemporary demands for representative identity politics.
What distinguishes Photorealism from other kinds of painstaking mimesis, such as trompe l’oeil or hyperrealism, is less well-defined here (sculptures by Duane Hanson and Marilyn Levine, for instance, are prominently featured), but it seems to have much to do with the ever-growing pervasiveness of the snapshot as our culture’s dominant category of image and frame for figuration. And while everything in this forty-four-person show demonstrates a high degree of precise detailing and particularity indicative of photography’s influence, several of the most compelling works hinge on their explicit reference to the technology: Vija Celmins’s iconic drawings Hiroshima and Zeppelin, both 1968, are what she calls “redescriptions” of loose-leaf photographic reproductions. Michael Alvarez’s recent paintings, including Look at this Photograph (L-R Primas Locas y EL Mike, Flea, Go Shorty it’s Your Birthday), 2018, re-create enlarged versions of peel-and-stick pages in family photo albums. Joan Semmel’s Four Rings, 2003, and Lenore Chinn’s Déjà Vu, 1986, are both self-portraits in which the cameras taking the snapshots are included in the paintings’ composition.
The exhibition is organized thematically but anchors itself historically in the seminal work of key artists—such as John Baeder, Robert Bechtle, Celmins, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Richard McLean, and Idelle Weber—who documented mundane, personal, and sometimes abject scenes of the everyday. Bechtle’s characterization of his approach as “no-style painting” posits Photorealism as a weird sibling paradoxically in sync with the contemporaneous developments of Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Pop. Katz also traces Photorealism’s origins to feminist painters of the early ’70s who depicted overtly gendered and sexual subject matter. Painters using this approach include Semmel, Audrey Flack, and Betty Tompkins, whose Fuck Painting #6, 1973, is on view here and always makes an impression.
A room dedicated to Black figuration, triangulating Barkley L. Hendricks, Kehinde Wiley, and Amy Sherald, is rather less convincing as Photorealism per se than the many paintings celebrating Chicano subjects by artists such as Alvarez, Shizu Saldamando, Jesse Treviño, and John Valadez, who labor to connect aesthetic and political representation. Another room explores the documentary role of the photograph as a still frame within a sequence or history, juxtaposing Ben Sakoguchi’s large multipanel opus Bombs, 1983—which pictures scenes of atomic explosions, warheads, military planes, and victims, all containing journalistic captions—with Cynthia Daignault’s Twenty-Six Seconds, 2024, an enormous wall-size grid of small panels, each a frame in Abraham Zapruder’s famous film capturing the moment of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The juxtaposition also contrasts the range of techniques employed in Photorealism, from Sakoguchi’s stenciled and airbrushed paintings with uncannily sharp edge-quality to Daignault’s comparatively loose painterly compositions.
While who is included and who is not will inevitably spark debate, there are many lesser-known gems to relish, perhaps none more than Takako Yamaguchi’s three large paintings (from 2012 to 2017) of cropped views of her clothed body—a striped navy skirt and belt, a white crochet top, and the buttons and collar of a raincoat. Recalling the close-cropped paintings of hairdos, garment fasteners, and high heels by Domenico Gnoli, they are showstoppers, presiding over the exhibition’s final gallery with a display at once brazen and understated, trumpeting a secret that may be at the heart of Photorealism’s persistent power: that the human hand, even as it toils to approach mechanical perfection, will always imbue pictures with an ineffable shadow meaning full of intent that has everything to do with time and how we choose to spend our own little bit of it.