His career has been an ongoing exploration of this issue. In 1970, he began working in color, which he applied with the same process used for printing color photographs or color reproductions in a book: He layered the three primary colors and black until the top layer was actually color-correct. Close’s quest to study how images are made led him to paint with his thumb, putting one thumb mark of a different color and value within each square of his grid, or to paint with different shaped and colored marks within each grid square. With these techniques, no one could describe his blurry, painterly images as Photorealist, although the work was still based on photographs, but looked more like computer-generated images, each square an enlarged pixel.

Unlike Close and the Photorealists, Malcolm Morley used photographs from the media. He emerged toward 1964, a few years before Close and Estes, painting ships he found on posters and postcards or rendering found snapshots of middle-class white families vacationing on beaches or dining on lavish ocean liners. Morley’s paint handling, however, was sometimes pasty and visible, clearly indicating this was a painting of a photograph and not an attempt to make his image look like an actual photograph. He sometimes left a white border around his image, just like the border on snapshots, thus, reinforcing the photographic source of his picture.

In his deadpan paintings of ocean liners and battleships, Morley is telling us that paintings, just like photographic images, can be vague, misleading and open to interpretation. His works, which were based on travel posters or snapshots of affluent vacationing families, appear equally deadpan, although they are filled with social commentary. These paintings were created during the social revolution of the 1960s, when the American status quo of a white, patriarchal society as reinforced by the media was under attack. By re-presenting these kinds of mass media images, Morley was subversively underscoring their artificiality. Like Close, he would become increasingly painterly in succeeding decades, and his imagery fractured as he juxtaposed what appeared to be disparate fragments culled from a variety of images.

While Richter is never associated with the Super-Realists, there are numerous reasons for discussing him here. Like Morley, Richter emerged in 1963–64, albeit in Düsseldorf, predating American Super-Realism. His preoccupation with the photograph is important, for it reflects how important photography was becoming worldwide and how its images were structuring public opinion. For many painters, it was rapidly becoming the most valid way to justify the act of painting, which by the end of the decade many critics were declaring dead, killed by Minimal and Conceptual art. Richter was especially influenced by Rauschenberg and the Pop artists and their appropriation of the media, which reinforced the importance of American Pop in spurring the period’s infatuation with the photograph and its relationship to painting.

Richter initially called his photography-based style “Capitalist Realism,” underscoring how the media served the financial interests of specific groups, corporations or individuals. He painted family snapshots of his uncle in a Nazi uniform and of found media images of dive-bombing World War II airplanes. He painted eight individual portraits, probably based on yearbook photographs, of the nurses who were murdered in Chicago by Richard Speck. In every instance, he painted a slightly blurry image, distinct enough to identify the subject and recognize that it is based on a photograph, but distorted enough to suggest an ambiguity of sorts. The visual ambiguity was intended to suggest an ambiguity of meaning: What is the intended meaning of this snapshot of a man in a Nazi uniform, of warplanes or murdered nurses, who the viewer does not even know are murdered nurses since they are presented as portraits lifted from a school yearbook?