Richard Estes' Alice Tully Hall illustrates the artist's ability to manipulate the compositions captured by his camera and play with perspective in order to arrive at a painting faithful to his vision of the city. Estes's artistic practice focuses on documenting the world around him in photographs, which he then translates into paintings. Although revered as the foremost exponent of photorealism, Estes can more accurately be described as a photo-derived painter instrumental in pioneering the use of photography not as a final destination but as a wellspring of data for his artistic process.

Alice Tully Hall showcases Estes' penchant for capturing the complex cityscape and depicts a favored location for the artist in the vicinity of Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Estes masterfully renders the distinctive architecture of the concert hall affiliated with the prestigious Julliard School. In the present painting, the myriad reflections of buildings and glares on windowpanes create abstract sections of the composition, notably in the large geometric shapes of the foreground and the minutely detailed interior of the hall that coalesce into a hyper-realist painting. This method introduces a level of complexity that surpasses the capabilities of a camera, incorporating a multitude of angles and viewpoints.