It is ironic that Alloway devotes half his “Notes on Realism” to the “emergent group” of Photo-Realists, and how they were doing something new and different in Realism. Having made a distinction between those artists who work directly from life—Realists—and those who work from photographs, Alloway declares that it is this latter group who “steal the show” of 22 Realists. Working from photographs was essentially a “post-Pop way of working” in that Pop was crucial to the approach, but “Pop art was neither abstract nor realist; the legible references in Pop art are to signs, not to objects in space (the irreducible subject of realism).” Signs are “emblematic (indicating a learned or institutionalized relation with a product or channel) and so do not require “spatial apprehension.” Through this interplay of “accurate reference and syntactic curiosity,” the “photograph-users”—Alloway does not use the term Photo-Realists in this article—are creating a “sign-aggregate, consisting of the conventional sign of the source and the usurped sign re-contextualized as art.” The work of Malcolm Morley, Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle, Richard McLean, and Harold Bruder appears “brilliant and tough compared to their apparently hesitant company” in the exhibition. The degree of finish of their work “has a built-in handsomeness, comparable to American abstract painting in its impervious autonomy.” Alloway attempts to analyse Photo-Realism's appeal: “It has to do, I think, with a play of marvels, which realism proper, as it has moved in other directions, has sternly eschewed. Thus post-Pop painting rehabilitates our sense of wonder by a complex kind of trompe-l'oeil…”

Alloway had the opportunity to write at greater length about Photo-Realism when he was commissioned to write the introduction to the 1973 catalogue on Photo-Realism Paintings, sculpture and prints from the Ludwig Collection and others, an exhibition that took place at the Serpentine Gallery in London. He traces the tendency back ten years, starting with Richard Artschwager's monochromes of buildings—“a cross between newsprint and Daguerre”—and Malcolm Morley who painted monochrome naval images before, in 1965, commencing on fully coloured paintings of ocean liners followed by cabin interiors.