Horacio Coppola was born to Italian immigrant parents in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1906; he learned the basics of photography from his eldest brother and participated in local initiatives promoting innovative visual arts and cinema. Coppola set sail for Europe in December 1930, meeting and marrying the German-Jewish photographer, Grete Stern, with whom he immigrated to England in 1933. In London, the couple mixed with a lively community of German émigré artists and intellectuals and Coppola, commissioned by Christian Zevros, made a 16mm film entitled 'A Sunday in Hampstead Heath'.
Photographer Horacio Coppola was born to Italian immigrant parents in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1906. He learned the basics of photography from his eldest brother Armando – a dentist by profession, but also a recognised painter and amateur photographer – taking photographs with Armando's large format camera, prior to purchasing his own 18 x 24 cm bellows camera in 1928. During this period Coppola became involved with the Asociación Amigos del Arte, a private institution founded in 1924 by the city’s cultural and social elite to promote local and international trends in contemporary art, literature, architecture and music (Marcoci and Meister, 2015), and in 1929, he co-founded and became secretary of the steering committee of the Cine Club de Buenos Aires, which held weekly screenings of innovative foreign films in the auditorium of the Amigos. In the same year, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges chose two of Coppola’s photographs of Buenos Aires to illustrate his biography of the Argentinian poet Evaristo Carriego. Coppola set sail for Europe in December 1930 and spent five months travelling through Italy, Germany, France and Spain. He was particularly impressed by Berlin and returned to the city in October 1932, meeting the German-Jewish photographer, Grete Stern, whom he afterwards married. Stern introduced him to the German photographer Walter Peterhans, the photography course leader at the Bauhaus in Dessau, with whom he subsequently trained, also working as an assistant at the Filmstudio Tempelhof.
Following Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship and the closure of the Bauhaus, Coppola immigrated to England, settling in London with Stern and her brother Walter in December 1933. In London, Coppola and Stern socialised with a vibrant community of German émigré artists and intellectuals that included the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the actress Helene Weigel. Coppola was also commissioned in London by Christian Zervos (founder of the distinguished gallery, publishing house and journal known as Cahiers d’Art) to photograph Mesopotamian artefacts housed in the Musée du Louvre and the British Museum for a book titled L’art de la Mésopotamie. Zervos was delighted with the photographs and, in his foreword to the book, credited them with ‘[bringing] forth, in a remarkable fashion, the deep feeling that emerges from within [the artefacts]’ (cited Marcoci and Meister, 2015). The British sculptor Henry Moore also singled out Coppola’s photographs for praise in a lengthy book review that he wrote for The Listener. In 1935, Coppola made a 16mm film entitled A Sunday in Hampstead Heath, which is not only the longest of the three films he made in Europe but, according to one critic, ‘has the most delicate framings, the best compositions and a perfect structure’ (Oubiña, 2015). In this fragmentary and poetic account of the everyday life of the city, Coppola demonstrates an engagement with Surrealism which can also be seen in the photographs that he took when wandering the streets of London.
In 1935, Coppola returned to Buenos Aires with Stern and their two children. In October, the couple held an exhibition at the offices of the avant-garde literary magazine Sur, which has been described as ‘the foundation of modern photography in Argentina’ (Marcoci and Meister, 2015). Coppola’s reputation as one of Argentina’s foremost photographers was secured the following year by the iconic series of photographs that he took of Buenos Aires at night. In 1937, Coppola and Stern set up a photography, graphic design and advertising studio together which they ran until 1941. The couple separated the following year and, in 1959, Coppola married former Argentine pianist Raquel Palomeque. From the 1960s onwards, he began to experiment with colour film photography, as well as teaching and writing about photography, curating exhibitions and compiling catalogues. Coppola died in Buenos Aires in 2012. The Tate holds seven of Coppola’s photographs of London. In 2015, he and Stern were the subjects of From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, a major retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Horacio Coppola]
Publications related to [Horacio Coppola] in the Ben Uri Library