Photorealism evolved out of Pop artists’ reliance on photographs but took photo-based painting to a new level. The Photorealists abandoned irony and overt social commentary preferring a meticulous rendition faithful to the photographic reference. Complicated street scenes of Manhattan with numerous storefront reflections of skyscrapers, pedestrians and city buses were a common theme. Also, they reintroduced the figure and portrait as a serious subject matter though they preferred the quotidian character over the mythic or ideal.
By taking fleeting, complicated or incidental subjects they by necessity became wedded to the photograph. In doing so, they followed in the footsteps of any artist in the past that used an optical aid or device (such as a mirror, black glass, camera lucida or camera obscura). More specifically, there were artists of the past who used photographs as an aid in making paintings: Gerome and the Orientalists of the late 19th century France, Modernists from Picasso to Max Ernst to Dali and commercial illustrators of the 20th century. Though there was artistic precedence, Photorealists did something new.
By staying faithful to the photograph, they painted not what the eye saw but rather what the camera saw. Previous artists used the photograph as a tool to assist with the details of a pose or an aspect of architecture. It was a way to lend specificity to an artwork that was otherwise based on painting from observation (or at least painting from principles of observation). The Photorealist took the photograph as that which should be painted. In doing so they replaced the search for the truths of Nature with something else, a mechanically produced flat copy of reality.
The Photorealists preferred the aesthetics of the lens to that of sight. What one sees is a complicated coalescing of electromagnetic signals as visual input which has been transferred as chemical information to a brain where it is recognized in consciousness. The camera is dead, fixed and inert where as sight is alive, changing and active.
By preferring the lens over the eye, the Photorealists separated themselves from the unfolding history of representational art. They removed themselves from the empirical concerns and discussions of previous artists. No longer did they ask “what are the principles of Nature, what does the eye see and how does one depict it?”. By choosing an image as the final arbiter over any visual conundrums, they, in a manner unimaginable to previous Realists, successfully excised Nature from painting.