This was one of my first commissions, another painting using the Morley photo-realist technique (see Prawns). Photo-realism is often used as a term that is interchangeable with super or hyper-realism, and although all are intimately related and bound up with the cultural theories of simulacra and hyper-reality described by Baudrillard, photo-realism is specifically concerned with reproduction by hand of mechanical / photographic images, carefully reproducing the flaws in exposure and soft focus of the original reproduction. Portloe is a good example of this with the slightly arbitrary cropping, blurring and bleached out exposure of a high-street shop developed snapshot carefully rendered in oil paint.