The two terms get used interchangeably and they should not be. Photorealism names an American movement of the late sixties whose subject was the photograph itself. Hyperrealism names what came after, mostly in Europe, where the photograph became a tool rather than a topic. The dates, the intentions and the surfaces all differ, and once you see the split you cannot unsee it.
The confusion has a simple cause. Both groups make pictures that look photographic at a glance, and dealers have little commercial reason to insist on the distinction. Museums do insist, which is why catalogue essays and gallery press releases often use different words for the same painting.
Photorealism came first
The dealer Louis Meisel coined the term at the end of the sixties for painters who worked from photographs and did nothing to hide it. Estes, Goings, Bechtle and Close were painting American surfaces: diners, pickup trucks, shop windows, faces reproduced at billboard scale. The photograph was the subject as much as the diner was, and the flatness of photographic space was part of what they were reporting on.
That generation also accepted photographic limits. Estes kept the shallow depth of field where his source had it, and Close reproduced the focus falloff of a portrait lens across a nine foot face. The pictures argue that this is how images look now, and they leave it there.
Hyperrealism took the same starting materials and removed the limits. European painters from the mid seventies onward corrected the photograph rather than transcribing it, sharpening what the lens had blurred and raising the resolution beyond anything the source contained. The picture stopped being a report on photography and became an object competing with it.
- Photorealism dates from the late sixties in the United States, hyperrealism from the seventies in Europe
- Photorealists keep the blur of the source, hyperrealists remove it across the whole surface
- Photorealist subjects lean American and urban, hyperrealist subjects lean toward skin, glass and cloth
- Photorealism has a documentary argument behind it, hyperrealism has a technical one
- Auction prices for the original photorealists run well above living hyperrealist painters
The price gap in that last line is the most practical consequence of the distinction. Photorealism is a closed historical movement with a fixed supply and a place in the museum narrative. Hyperrealism is an open practice with new work arriving constantly, and open categories do not price like closed ones.
Supply works differently on the two sides for a reason that has nothing to do with quality. The photorealists worked slowly and most of them produced fewer than ten canvases a year, so the historical body of work is small and largely placed already. Living hyperrealist painters work at a similar pace, but there are many more of them and nothing has settled yet.
Which term to use
For work made before about 1975 by an American painter, photorealism is correct and specialists will expect it. For anything made after that, hyperrealism is safer and more common outside the United States. When a gallery uses the terms as synonyms, that tells you something useful about how carefully the rest of their material has been prepared.
There is a simple test that settles most cases in a minute. Find the part of the picture that would have been out of focus in any photograph, usually a background edge or an object close to the lens, and see whether the painter kept the blur or resolved it. Kept blur points to photorealism, resolved detail points to hyperrealism, and the answer is rarely ambiguous.
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
Ansel Adams, photographer
Adams was talking about photography, and the line applies to both movements with equal force. Sharpness is cheap now in every medium, and it has never been a substitute for having a reason to make the picture.
