Post-depression America was in desperate need of a defining iconography that would lift it out of the black and white doldrums, and it came in the form of Gil Elvgren's Technicolor fantasies of the American dream. His technique involved photographing models and then painting them into hyper-reality.
This is the third volume in a series begun in the early 1970s, Louis K. Meisel's ongoing chronicle of an entire contemporary movement - Photorealism. The book has more than 600 illustrations and the essay by Linda Chase places the paintings in context.