Beholding the Ordinary

I know I’m not supposed to, but I’ve always had a thing for photorealism. Like a pop song you’d never admit you love, it’s easy to disparage but hard to resist.

A style of art dismissed by some as outmoded and others as a market novelty, photorealism mimics the precision of photography. It works its magic in surprisingly mundane ways, originally relying on mechanical aids like grid transfers or projectors – and now employing common digital tools – to render everyday subjects with uncanny accuracy and detail. At first glance, photorealist paintings can look indistinguishable from their photographic source material, which is partly their aim.

Born, as I was, in the late 1960s, photorealism has always felt familiar to me in ways I can’t fully untangle, its prosaic subjects reflecting the early visual world that formed me. During this period, American and European cultures were awash in new media, mass imagery, and a shifting sense of realism. It was the age of television, Kodachrome, and a growing hunger for images that reflected lived experience.

By the late eighties, many critics derided the style as outdated. But photorealism has never really gone away. In fact, it has continued to influence generation after generation of younger artists.

The exhibit Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, which ran at MOCA in Los Angeles from late November 2024 through early May 2025, brought together over forty artists from the past six decades to explore the movement’s legacy. It reexamined how the style engages with notions of labor, visibility, and representation, especially of everyday people and overlooked histories. It argued that photorealism remains a potent way to think through how images shape us in a visually saturated age. 

I’ve already admitted my soft spot for photorealism, and if the crowds I saw when visiting the show are anything to go by, I’m clearly not alone. I find something so satisfying about it – it reminds me of the now ubiquitous simulations in pop culture, like the texture and sheen of countless, perfectly rendered hairs on a Pixar creature, or a video game cutscene that convincingly mimics a handheld camera shot. Photorealism’s replication of photography’s visual accuracy, illusionistic quality, and fidelity to the world we know is immediately fascinating. These are images that stun with their detail and entertain with their audacity. 

Whether in the context of fine art or entertainment, hyperreal images captivate because they toy with perception. They blur the line between seeing and believing, between the real and its simulation, and that uncertainty becomes its own form of delight. But unlike popular media, photorealism contains a central paradox. The photographic source material it mimics – often banal, everyday snapshots – is something we’re trained to look through, not at. We care about what’s pictured: the subject. We take for granted the physical medium, whether printed page or glowing screen, through which an image and its subject appear. Yet art like that in the MOCA show slows us down and forces us to notice its materiality, which in turn invites us to imagine the labor of the hand, though it frequently leaves no trace of itself. The image becomes physical again: paint on canvas, time embodied.

Historically, photorealism has been popular with mainstream museumgoers but often denigrated by art critics as populist – as slick, simple, and lacking the conceptual weight needed to be taken seriously. So there’s always been something slightly embarrassing about liking it too much. With this exhibition, MOCA was giving me the perfect excuse to indulge in the kind of art I’ve long harbored as a guilty pleasure.

This alone would have been enough. But stepping into the first gallery and reading the wall texts, I was caught off guard: the show’s themes spoke directly to questions I’ve been exploring at the intersection of art and spirituality. By focusing on the ways photorealism nurtures attention, emphasizes the commitment to sustained effort, and pays reverence to the overlooked, a show centered on distinctly worldly subjects unexpectedly evoked aspects of Christian contemplative life.

One of the successes of Ordinary People was that it revealed the often overlooked virtues that ground the act of making itself. In this spirit, viewers were invited to look beneath photorealism’s brilliant surfaces, beyond the technical prowess. I felt the show calling me to recognize something more grounded: a set of habits, almost monastic in their insistence, which bring the artist closer to the real. In the way the show framed the rigor of photorealism, attention, effort, and reverence arose not as abstract ideals but as lived disciplines, felt through many works in the pressure of graphite, the weight of resin, or the drag of brush across canvas.

Seeing how Ordinary People both underscored the labor of making and promoted the devotion of looking – aspects of art often eclipsed by contemporary exhibitions centered on cultural critique – made me recall the lineage of spiritual discipline that reaches back to the earliest monastics in the deserts of Egypt – a connection I wouldn’t have thought I’d find in a photorealist show. The Desert Fathers and Mothers spent their lives cultivating habits of prolonged inward attention. These ascetics, monks, and hermits viewed even the most ordinary tasks as occasions for prayer and devotion.

Photorealists can sometimes labor in their studio for months or even years to make a single picture. I think particularly of the hesychasm of Eastern Christianity, a type of monastic life based on interior stillness and continual prayer. It’s not hard to see this tradition as an analogue to the concentrated labor of the photorealist. These artists attend each day to an image assembled through successive, incremental gestures until wholeness is achieved.

While curator Anna Katz aligns the artist with the working class through the tactile routines that bind craft and labor, it’s important to recognize a crucial distinction. This is not the worker defined by productivity, efficiency, or economic output. Instead, the labor on view evokes something quieter and deeper – a form of work with its own rhythm and intention. The artist’s aim and outcome are radically different from others who make things. Which is to say, art is not, or shouldn’t be, about producing goods but about sustaining a contemplative engagement with the world.

Yet it was thanks to the worker-artist analogy that I began to see the artist’s labor as resonating with monastic practice. This angle demythologized and recast the artist, not as an inspired genius but as a disciplined practitioner, whose work unfolds through painstaking dedication and the slow, deliberate accumulation of detail that defines photorealism. In this way, the artist enters the world of the meditative seeker. Creative labor can then be seen in a continuum with spiritual life, where the ordinary becomes luminous through devotion.

Indeed, emphasizing the photorealist’s labor opens a window to reflect on the enduring ethos of figures like Benedict of Nursia, who integrated manual labor into the rhythm of divine contemplation. Or Bernard of Clairvaux, whose theology was grounded in affective experience shaped through physical discipline and repetition. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, too, offers figures such as Gregory Palamas, who emphasized the integration of bodily practices into the experience of divine light. Across these traditions, the physical work of the hands becomes inseparable from the stillness of the heart.

And of course, with monks come manuscripts. These were painstakingly crafted by men who devoted their lives to preserving sacred texts through the act of meticulous copying. Their methods were laborious, built on repetition, discipline, and a commitment to fidelity over invention. Sequestered in the scriptorium, they created texts not to express themselves but to preserve something greater than themselves: sacred words, inherited wisdom, the fragile continuity of culture. Yet over time, even this austere, self-effacing practice gave rise to striking aesthetic forms. In later periods, this expanded into rich illumination, with color and ornament elevating the sacred without disrupting the restraint of the page. Their labor produced vessels of great meaning whose aesthetic power is rooted in the purity of attention they embody.

Through the disciplined stewardship of daily tasks, the ethic of diligence and simplicity, and the theological emphasis on vocation, the Protestant imagination, too, has long sanctified ordinary labor as a site of devotion. Rather than separating sacred from secular, Protestant denominations affirm the spiritual significance of everyday work when carried out with care and intention.

While photorealism finds kinship with spiritual practice in its devotional labor, it also recalls periods like the Dutch Golden Age, which shared an interest in realism and a desire to elevate the ordinary to the realm of the extraordinary. Artists such as Pieter Claesz, Willem Claesz. Heda, Willem Kalf, and Harmen Steenwijck painted still lifes that often took the form of vanitas compositions. These were arrangements of common objects such as fruit, flowers, or table settings that symbolized life’s fragility, divine order, and the fleeting nature of material wealth. By including overt reminders of mortality, such as skulls, extinguished candles, or hourglasses, these paintings urged viewers to reflect on the temporality of life and the enduring significance of spiritual concerns.

An important question is who, exactly, are the ordinary people of the show’s title? And how does photorealism transform our perception of an individual or community when it depicts them with the same vivid intensity it applies to objects and places?

Photorealism’s power to draw attention to overlooked people, those socially marginalized, was one of the show’s most persistent themes. Many of these artists rendered their human subjects in ways reminiscent of how religious painters once depicted kings, martyrs, and saints. Such an interest is historically linked to a theology that sees God in the immanent: in the body and in daily life. Many of those portrayed belong to communities historically pushed to the margins, including people of color and the working class. The art elevates them, restoring their dignity as individuals. Examples include sculpture by John Ahearn and Duane Hanson and paintings by Barkley L. Hendricks, John Valadez, and Kehinde Wiley. Each of these artists endows their human subjects with visual weight and presence, reflecting Jesus’ own words: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40). 

Seen alongside more conceptually driven uses of photorealism, or recent works that take photorealist influence in more speculative directions, the art of early, canonical artists reveals that photorealism was not a closed historical moment or stylistic curiosity, but foundational.

Audrey Flack, the best-known female artist among the original photorealists, centers female experience and vision, long overlooked in art history. Exhibited alongside a younger generation of female artists like Judie Bamber and Takako Yamaguchi – artists whose beautifully rendered drawings and paintings explore identity, memory, and materiality – reveals her work’s enduring influence.

Audrey Flack, Leonardo’s Lady, 1974. ©️ Audrey Flack (1974). Courtesy of Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

In Leonardo’s Lady (1974), Flack reclaims and reconfigures the genre of still life, bringing a distinctly feminist and devotional sensibility to photorealism. The composition includes a painted appropriation of a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, surrounded by items such as a porcelain puttu, a glass of red liquid, a pocket watch, a pear, cosmetics, and a voluptuous rose. While her male peers in the 1970s often turned their attention to cars, storefronts, and other markers of postwar American life, Flack chose subjects saturated with symbolic and emotional charge. The titular allusion to Leonardo da Vinci invokes the Western canon while simultaneously unsettling it: this is not a portrait of distant nobility but of intimate yearning, filtered through objects that speak to women’s lived experience. The reflective surfaces, the clustered symbols, and the tight framing all recall the vanitas tradition, in which everyday objects become vessels of mortality, beauty, and spiritual longing. Flack’s rendering of the feminine is not merely representational but ritualistic. The piece functions like an altar; dense, radiant, and insistent. Leonardo’s Lady moves beyond surface to suggest that femininity itself has long been a site of cultural projection and private resilience. In Flack’s hands, the photorealist technique becomes a means of bearing witness.

Ralph Goings, Walt’s Restaurant, 1978–79. ©️ Ralph Goings (1979). Courtesy of Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

Ralph Goings’s Walt’s Restaurant (1978–79) captures a familiar, ordinary subject: an older man lingering over coffee in a diner. Goings, like other photorealists of his generation, was engaged in transforming the traditional vocabulary of genre painting. He turned away from aristocratic interiors and idealized landscapes to examine the vernacular spaces of American life. Here, the diner becomes a site of quiet revelation. His focus on commonplace settings reflects an appreciation for the nuances of daily life. Like his still life paintings of donuts and coffee, saltshakers and ketchup bottles, Walt’s Restaurant elevates the overlooked with painterly rigor. In doing so, Goings upholds a deeply democratic visual ethic. He locates dignity not in grand narratives but in the surfaces and spaces of the ordinary. His work affirms that the textures of working-class life, with its quiet routines and worn surfaces, are worthy of close attention.

Richard McLean, WIshing Well Bridge, 1972. ©️ Richard McLean (1974). Courtesy of Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

So, too, are the works of Richard McLean. His Wishing Well Bridge (1972) and Foxy Mac (1974) demonstrate the subtle conceptual complexity behind the lustrous surfaces he creates. At first glance, these works seem like loving tributes to equestrian showmanship: gleaming coats and rigid poses speak to the polished world of horse breeding and competition. But McLean’s treatment of these subjects, which are drawn from color Kodachromes and equestrian magazines, points to something more thoughtful. His horses aren’t animated by personality so much as posed into submission, their grandeur filtered through layers of photographic mediation. The slick finish and apparent naturalism, reminiscent of Technicolor film and commercial advertising, when studied closely, eventually collapse into self-conscious artifice.

Richard McLean, Foxy Mac, 1974. ©️ Richard McLean (1974). Courtesy of Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

In Foxy Mac, the symmetry of the horse’s posture and the stage-like setting push against naturalism, hinting at how these animals become icons of aspiration and status in American culture. In Wishing Well Bridge, McLean departs from his typical focus on horses, focusing instead on the social and cultural elements surrounding equestrian events. The painting features pageant winners and an ornate, empty saddle awarded as a prize, emphasizing the ceremonial aspects of this subculture. Through this work, McLean explores themes of identity and tradition as he interrogates the ways beauty, nostalgia, and authority are manufactured and consumed. What looks at first glance like sentimental imagery turns out to be a nuanced critique.

Rather than inviting communion with the subject, McLean’s paintings expose the mechanisms of image-making itself. How ideals are formed, frozen, and worshipped. He probes not what we see, but how we want to see: the distortions of mediated perfection, the distance between surface and depth. If other works in the show restored dignity to the overlooked, McLean’s paintings challenge us to question the kinds of visibility we valorize, and what is lost when beauty becomes confused with spectacle. 

I’m not claiming that photorealist art retains some exclusive relationship to contemplative practices. But it can sharpen our understanding of how art aids in spiritual inquiry and revelation. By virtue of its slow, exacting process and heightened visual impact, photorealism draws attention to the spiritual dimension of perception, where seeing becomes an act of attunement.

Indeed, its contemplative charge is reinforced through the technical demands of the style. Artists begin with a camera and photographic source and transfer the image to canvas using either projection or a gridded system. Technological advances in cameras and digital equipment have led to the production of art with even more precision. This has allowed artists to adapt the style across a wide range of media. The final paintings, typically much larger than the original photograph, aim to simulate the photographic image with uncanny precision. This often involves mastering effects like reflections, textures, the play of light and shadow, or complex perspectives and geometries.

In a distracted age like ours, photorealism seems countercultural. This is because it subverts simulation. As theorists like Jean Baudrillard have noted, we now live amid images of images, simulations with no original referent. Photorealism doubles this illusion: these artworks are not copies of life but copies of photographs of life. In this way, they reflect our estrangement from reality while also urging us to notice it more acutely. By remaking the already-seen through a demanding, manual process, photorealism paradoxically restores presence to routinely consumed images. At a time when popular graphic software can fabricate images in seconds, these works foreground human effort: the brushstroke, the correction, the discipline of showing up again and again. In that sense, photorealism resonates not only with the workbench but with the cloister, not only with the studio but with the chapel.

In its stylistic extremes – its heightened photographic clarity and meticulous execution – photorealism makes uniquely visible what art has always done: it pulls presence out of transience. And by estranging us from the real through its doubled image, it paradoxically sharpens our awareness of the real, anchoring us in the blunt materiality and skillful labor that digital images so often efface.

The large scale of many photorealist works echoes the dimensions and gravity of religious art and stands in sharp contrast to the handheld screen. Where digital images are weightless, photorealist paintings and sculptures have heft. Where Instagram filters automate design, photorealism reflects cultivated technique, embodied labor, and an intimacy with tools honed over years. This sense of commitment links these artists not only to traditional craftsmanship but also to older spiritual modes of work, what monks called opus Dei, the work of God. Seen this way, photorealism becomes more than a display of technical mastery; it enacts a kind of resistance to our society of spectacle. The photorealist, like the monk, labors with the image not to conquer it but to meet it.

Such discipline transforms that which would normally be passively received into something actively beheld. Images from daily life thus provide the opportunity for a painted encounter, reasserting the body and spirit in the act of seeing.