In the late 1960s, as consumerism was on the rise, artists like Chuck Close and Richard Estes veered away from abstraction and returned to the joys of figuration. But it was different this time—they would paint the era’s televisions, cars, and highways so precisely that they resembled photographs. In “Ordinary People,” drawings, sculptures, and archival materials trace the history and legacy of the movement that became known as “photorealism.” Defined by the Guggenheim Museum as “the production of images that deployed near-microscopic detail to achieve the highest degree of representational verisimilitude possible,” this exhibition at MOCA, Los Angeles, argues that photorealism is not an end point of representation but the beginning of new strategies of expression in contemporary art. —Elena Clavarino