Many critics of photorealism relied on the concept of nostalgia to dismiss the movement, finding in these apparently photographically accurate paintings representations of a simple past which seemed to disregard the complicated problems of the day. These critics, speaking within the constraints of a period when nostalgia experienced wider appeal than usual, offered what has become one of the accepted, and simplistic, interpretations of photorealism. Disenchanted by an apparently sentimental art popularized in mass-media photospreads and even business journals, critics of photorealism depended on a negative sense of nostalgia to dismiss these paintings as expressions of ineffective longings. However, Fredric Jameson's recent articulation of the utopian content in nostalgic yearnings affords the paradigm an affirmative element. Building on Jameson's model, I argue that Robert Bechtle's family paintings, taken as a group, display nostalgic desires for the secure families of the past even as they engage with contemporary popular and media-sustained perceptions of the breakdown of the family. In mediating conflicting or dissonant cultural pressures and desires, Bechtle's works at times display an ambivalent position toward the family as they echo fifties values for family unity while they capture seventies dissatisfactions with family tensions. Precisely because “the family” inspired controversy during the late 1960s and 1970s, it also became the site of nostalgic longings, as many Americans found images evocative of older domestic norms comforting. The family also serves as the hinge linking the present and past in Bechtle's works, displaying what I call the temporal density of nostalgia.