Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic

Photograph

A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...

. The term is primarily applied to paintings from the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 art movement

Art movement

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...

 that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As a full-fledged art movement, Photorealism evolved from Pop Art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

 and as a counter to Abstract Expressionism

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...

 as well as Minimalist art movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States.