I was just watching a live streamer draw what can only be described as a photo. It was made with a pencil, but you would not be able to tell it apart from what a camera can capture.
Supremely talented artists have been producing masterpieces for millennia yet I don’t recall ever seeing a “photo-real” drawing in a museum. Hundreds of realistic paintings, yes. But not a single piece that could be mistaken for a photo.
Is this hyper realistic approach a fairly new achievement in talent? Do our modern day pencils and paper make a difference? Was it simply unfashionable to produce such art hundreds of years ago?
Frankly, the lack of photo-references, and more importantly - the lack of any concept of photography or curved lensing to reference. I'd encourage you to look up Andre Bazin's "Ontology of the Photographic Image" for more on how the introduction of light as an additive medium (photography, as opposed to subtractive mediums like paint and ink) reshaped how fine art is perceived and utilized. The flattening of 3-dimensional space into a 2 dimensional plane for comprehensive study and reproduction.
The "Photo" part of "photo-realism" can be explored further, through a specific focus on lensing. The millimeter and curvature of the lenses involved in photography inform a lot more of what we perceive as "photo-real" than you would first think. For an analogous concept in principle, consider Escher's self portrait. He did, in a way create for himself a flattened image reference, as perceived by the curved lensing of 3D space, without the use of photography, and the results are similarly "photo-realistic".
[Anecdotally, my own partner was a talented but highly stylized illustrator before she started rendering photo references for her illustrations but now, even when drawing freehand, her art has permanently codified into a more photographic, less stylized approach, simply through practice, repetition, and comprehension of the physical and perceptual mechanisms involved with photography.]
Again, this returns to the Bazin essay, and the removal of "The Painter's Hand". Once a reference point for objective* reality was established, it allowed for the foundation of "Photo-real" as a style, like any other style before it. It wasn't for lack of talent, there are innumerable examples of nude model sketches and still life, and all manner of painting or illustration that are hyper-real, extraordinarily detailed, but the average artist simply hadn't thought to replicate reality as seen through a curved ~50mm lens before photography came along.
*Edit: An essential footnote I forgot to include. Bazin, a frenchman, uses the words "Objective reality" in a very specific way in his essay. The word he uses for "Lens" in French is "L' Objectif", the only thing that stands between subject and representation in photography.
One reason for less realistic drawings vs. paintings is that drawings were often done in service of paintings. Drawings were often not fully rendered, and only done as preparatory or exploratory work to figure out a painting. As a result they weren't fully rendered or realized. Take a look at a drawing study vs. [the final painting.] (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c1/10/7a/c1107a4db6b16c1525a488a96e98dfe2.jpg) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a French Neoclassical painter.
Very realistic drawings do exist, however. Rigorous naturalistic art academies proliferated across Europe and America in the late 19th-early20th centuries and you can find some stunning examples of drawings of and nude figures by students. I still wouldn't say these are photorealistic though - cameras do not see the way our eyes do, as explained on the other comments. Here are a couple of examples:
And a blog with a bunch more of varying styles and quality: http://inspirationalartworks.blogspot.com/2010/08/misc-academic-figure-drawings.html
Edit - I also want to add that these were all done from life, and not with aid from camera obscuras or lucidas (I have seen some comments on the internet who mistakenly believe that realistic work can only be done by "cheating" with these, as if using them were even cheating). We have extensive visual records of life drawing rooms, including photos, of these situations - often very cramped with lots of students. Academic painting was also highly competitive, with artists competing for prizes such as the Prix de Rome...but that's another topic.
1883: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/C9DMPY/drawing-class-at-the-slade-london-in-1883-C9DMPY.jpg
1865, Royal Academy: https://d1inegp6v2yuxm.cloudfront.net/royal-academy/image/upload/c_limit,cs_tinysrgb,dn_72,dpr_3.0,f_auto,fl_progressive.keep_iptc,w_950/ijcasnq19itf9gfrljmw.jpeg
A less naturalistic depiction - Benoit Louis Prevost, Ecole de Dessin, c.1751–77: https://d1inegp6v2yuxm.cloudfront.net/royal-academy/image/upload/c_limit,cs_tinysrgb,dn_72,dpr_1.0,f_auto,fl_progressive.keep_iptc,w_950/wz4czy5b2j1v9uxyb6bx.png
