The term Realism is a misnomer. It does not refer to an opposite to abstract artwork. Instead, especially when it's capitalized, it refers to a group of painters in France working in the mid nineteenth century, who refused to paint anything they could not see. They wouldn't paint an angel because they couldn't see any. They also tended to depict images of social ills that they perceived. It also refers to a group of writers working about the same time who wrote with the idea that sociaty was something real and could be understood as such. The Neo-Realists were a group of film makers in Italy right after WWII. They made their films using non-professional actors and told stories about the lower classes. Photo-Realism came later as a post-modern discussion of material, where the source of any particular painting was a photograph.

The ground gained by the Realists is still being used today, but we tend to catagorize the style as 'documentary photography'. The act of manipulating images to fix errors or to make a scene look more 'real' is just standard photographic practice. There ate plenty of successful fine art photographers still working that shoot straight and are still highly regarded because message and idea are more important then craft is today. (At least in the art world!)