Born July 31,
1906, Buenos Aires (died June 18, 2012) Horacio Coppola was an
Argentinian photographer who documented the gritty dynamism of Buenos Aires in
the 1930s through stunning black-and-white photos that engaged viewers with
their vertigo-inducing angles and experimental cropping. The 10th child in a family
of Italian immigrants Coppola was initially educated at home in a style that
followed a mixture of academic and South American traditions. He continued on
to study Law and Modern Languages in Buenos Aires after an early initiation
into the university. He became fully emerged into the cultural life of the city
"the years when the suburbs emerged as a literary and political urban
theme". While he studied he became the founding member of the Buenos Aires
first Cinema Club, the cinema being another of his great passions. These were
fruitful years, when the influence of the family receded before his direct
experience of the avant-garde, in a city where the words of Jorge Louis Borges,
the pictures of Alfredo Guttero and the teachings of Le Corbusier came
together....amidst films by Chaplin and Eisenstein, poems by Baudelaire recited
by Victoria Ocampo and a chance meeting with Marinetti, the creator of
Futurism.
In 1926, Coppola
began making his first photographs, and when he saw the prints he had made he
" became aware of his vision". In 1928 he managed to obtain a
classical 18x24cm bellows camera and started to experiment, producing
his first self-portrait and using crystal prisms between the light source and
the camera to create abstractions of glass. These pictures were undoubtedly
influenced by what he knew of the futurist movement. He also took his camera
out into the city and made his seminal pictures of Buenos Aires at night. He
first received recognition for his work when writer Jorge Luis Borges used his images to illustrate the biography Evaristo Carriego (1930).
Coppola subsequently travelled to Europe, where he briefly studied (1932-33)
under Walter Peterhans of the Bauhaus design
school in Berlin and developed his signature avant-garde style. Upon his return
to Argentina in 1936, he was commissioned to photograph Buenos Aires for its
400th anniversary and used his newly acquired Leica camera to compose his famed
nighttime street scenes and spirited snapshots of city life. Coppola was also
praised for his portraits of artists, such as Marc
Chagall and Joan Miró, and for his still life studies,
including Egg and Twine (1932). His work
was the subject of a retrospective in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art in
Buenos Aires.
Horacio Coppola is one of the last great
avant-garde artists from the 20's and 30's not to have received the recognition
he so justly deserves. This has been due to his reluctance to allow his work to
be exhibited and sold outside his native Argentina, apart from a small
collection in the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. michaelhoppengallery
All images © Horacio Coppola
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