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Camper (1972) is a lithograph by American photorealist painter Ralph Goings (1928–2016), a key figure in the American Surrealist movement. His works often depict scenes of everyday American life with remarkable precision and realism, such as trucks, diners, and ordinary foods in light and shadow.
Published by Shorewood Atelier, printed in an edition of 300. The composition measures 54 × 82.1 cm.
In 1978, Goings explained that his paintings were about light and about how objects appear in their environments. Goings transforms these mundane objects into symbols of American visual culture. He emphasizes that the photograph is “a tool, a way of seeing things more clearly,” not the object itself, but rather “transforming it—transforming it into a painting” (Goings, 2009). Through this process, Goings reinterprets photographic reality within the realm of painting, revealing, as Russell Bauman has pointed out, the “ambivalent relationship between reality and image” that defined photorealism in the 1970s: photorealism was not simply an imitation of advertising, such as in Pop Art, but rather a practice of documenting the everyday landscape through a “snapshot” perspective. Photorealist artists such as Ralph Goings often incorporated textual symbols and literal signs into their work to allude to the modern American environment while ironically questioning the legitimacy of image creation through photographic reproduction.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). “Camper.” In Documenta: The Super Realists. 1972. Accessed October 15, 2025.
Ralph Goings, Ralph Goings: Four Decades of Realism (Youngstown, OH: Butler Institute of American Art, 2004), 5.
Bowman, Russell. “Words and Images: A Persistent Paradox.” Art Journal 45, no. 4 (1985): 337. https://doi.org/10.2307/776809.
Goings, Ralph. Oral history interview with Ralph Goings, 2009 September 10–11. Interview by Karen Tsujimoto. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Meisel, Louis K. Photorealism in the Digital Age. New York: Abrams, 2020. Accessed October 16, 2025, 135.
