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History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 1 

Horacio Coppola: Towards an Aesthetic Genealogy 

Eleni Kefala 

University of St Andrews 

 

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in the 

journal History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016), available online: 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2016.1236887 

 

Although a milestone in the history of Latin American photography, the work of 

Horacio Coppola is little known outside Argentina. His unorthodox angles and 

tilting frames, his attention to industrial and urban themes, and his experimentation 

with different lenses in the period between 1927 and 1931 were in absolute 

synchrony with the precepts of European New Vision and New Objectivity 

photography, and with American straight photography. That Coppola’s visual 

idiom was in tune with the latest photographic developments in interwar Europe is 

obvious. What remains unclear is how exactly he achieved that synchrony. Several 

scholars have wrestled with this question, which nevertheless remains elusive due 

to lack of evidence of direct contact with European photography prior to his studies 

at the Berlin Bauhaus in 1932 and his repeated attempts to downplay the influence 

contemporary photographers had on his work. The article provides a systematic 

study of Coppola’s aesthetic genealogy and his photographic borrowings through a 

critical examination of his early pictures and theoretical writings. It teases out 

possible direct and indirect channels of dialogue with the New Vision, New 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 2 

Objectivity, and straight photography in the second half of the 1920s, and probes 

the reasons behind Coppola’s reluctance to admit a connection with contemporary 

European photography in particular. 

 

Keywords: Alfredo Guttero (1882–1932), José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), Le 

Corbusier (1887–1965), Horacio Coppola (1906–2012), Argentina, New Vision, 

New Objectivity, straight photography, avant-garde, Buenos Aires, Latin America, 

1920s, 1930s. 

 

Horacio Coppola is Argentina’s first truly modern photographer. If, according to Henry 

Miller, Brassai is the ‘eye of Paris’, Coppola is that of Buenos Aires.1 He is best known 

for his album Buenos Aires 1936: visión fotográfica, a volume commissioned by the 

mayor of Buenos Aires, Mariano de Vedia y Mitre, to commemorate the fourth 

centennial of the first foundation of the city by Pedro de Mendoza in 1536. 

Notwithstanding a milestone in the photographic modernism of Latin America and a fine 

example of Neue Sachlichkeit, or ‘New Objectivity’ photography, the album was far less 

experimental in nature than Coppola’s earlier work, which was in absolute synchrony 

with European ‘New Vision’ and North American ‘straight photography’. That the 

Argentine was in step with his contemporaries within and outside the Bauhaus before his 

sojourn there in 1932 is a truism. What remains uncertain is how precisely he attained 

that synchrony.  

 Scholarship has been ambiguous on the matter due to lack of evidence of an 

explicit liaison with European avant-garde photography before 1932. Coppola’s own 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 3 

silence regarding his readings on photography prior to his studies at the Berlin Bauhaus 

between October 1932 and April 1933, his rebuff of the impact the school exerted on his 

work, and the absence of relevant books from that period in his personal library have 

baffled researchers, who continue to grapple with the conundrum. While almost all 

scholars agree on Coppola’s possible contact with European visual aesthetics via a set of 

mediated sources, and especially cinema, prior to 1931, some speak of an intuitive 

photographer who was born ‘modern’ and whose knowledge of photographic 

developments outside pictorialist Argentina was awfully thin.2 Others put forward an 

American link, while a third group seems to accept a pre-Bauhaus influence of avant-

garde photography.3 Natalia Brizuela, for instance, entertains the possibility that the 

correspondence between Coppola’s Siete temas: Buenos Aires (Seven Subjects: Buenos 

Aires), a series of photographs published in the influential magazine Sur in 1931, and 

European New Vision photography might have sprung from his acquaintance with the 

work of Alfred Stieglitz.4 Brizuela speculates that in 1930 Coppola may have gained 

access to Stieglitz’s geometricised skies from his sequence Equivalents, or perhaps to the 

final issue of Camera Work (1917), a showcase of Paul Strand’s aesthetic outlook 

(namely his abstract prints and manifesto of straight photography), via the editor of Sur, 

Victoria Ocampo, who had visited the Maecenas of American photography at his New 

York gallery in that same year.5 By 1917, Strand had prefigured several formal themes of 

German New Objectivity photography with its emphasis on the object photographed and 

a straight, matter-of-fact approach, as well as a number of elements of the more 

experimental strand of New Vision photography, among them the jazzy high and low-

angle shots and the tilted camera that Coppola openly espoused in 1931 (figure 1).6  



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 4 

Strand’s clarion call to ‘a real respect for the thing’ in 1917 heralded, at least 

nominally, the demise of Pictorialism that had thrived around the globe since the 1880s, 

while the ‘absolute unqualified objectivity’ that he saw in some of Stieglitz’s photographs 

would materialise as the gonfalon of New Objectivity painting and photography in 

Europe, particularly in the Weimar Republic throughout the 1920s.7 His abstract pictures, 

a series of tilted photographs of chairs, shadows, porch railings, ridge poles, and 

deconstructed skies taken at his cottage in Twin Lakes in 1916, arguably headed the 

international photographic vanguard.8 Strand’s abstract visuality had been empowered by 

his study of Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque, undertaken at Stieglitz’s prompting. By 

turning his dwelling into an unheimlich place through his ‘freewheeling vision’, Strand 

latched onto what would soon constitute the rallying cry of the New Vision;9 the urge to 

revolutionise visual aesthetics, to see with a neue Auge (new eye), was a precept shared 

by any bona fide avant-gardist across the artistic spectrum. 

 The Bauhaus photographer and painter László Moholy-Nagy’s opus magnum 

Malerei Fotografie Film (Painting Photography Film) would formally set the tone for this 

neue Optik (literally, new lens; new vision) in 1925.10 The familiar-turned-unfamiliar, 

which Dziga Vertov trumpeted in his 1924 documentary Kino-Glaz (Kino-Eye), 

comprised the gist of Moholy-Nagy’s appeal – manifest in his iconic vertical shot of the 

Bauhaus balconies (1926)11 – as well as of that of Aleksandr Rodchenko, the Russian 

constructivist and major representative of New Vision photography who championed 

Vertov’s view: ‘I am kino-eye. I am mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as 

only I can see it.  [...] My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I 

decipher in a new way a world unknown to you’.12 Rodchenko had admittedly reached 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 5 

Strand via Vertov. With his di sotto in sù and high-angle photographs of his apartment on 

Myasnicka street in 1925, notes Victor Margolin, he ‘reinvented the building, making of 

it a series of novel views’, and so did Coppola six years later with his worm’s and bird’s-

eye shots of his building on 3060 Corrientes Street in Buenos Aires.13  

Coppola’s tilting frame may well have ensued from an American affair, as 

Brizuela implies, had Ocampo’s suitcase carried the final issue of Camera Work in 1930, 

but the scholar concedes that the photographer most likely had not ‘seen or read’ any 

work by Strand before 1931.14 I am therefore less inclined to settle on this story than on 

the one that sees Coppola becoming aware of New Vision photography during his 

Bildungsreise to Italy, Germany, France, and Spain between December 1930 and May 

1931 – in other words, prior to his 1931 photographs, incidentally taken with the brand 

new Leica 35mm that he had purchased in Europe.15 For all that Brizuela acknowledges 

that photographs like those of Siete temas are ‘in tune, no doubt, with the photographs of 

the New Vision’ as they ‘contain all the formal elements of the European New Vision’, 

she posits that in 1931 Coppola ‘does not know [them] yet’.16 Based on the absence of 

relevant books in his library and of any mention on his part of an acquaintance with 

avant-garde photography (either by visiting exhibitions or simply by sifting through 

publications in bookshops, museums, art galleries, and at gatherings with fellow 

cognoscenti), Brizuela seems to infer that Coppola learnt virtually nothing about New 

Vision photography during those months in Europe. Instead, she attributes his affinity 

with the New Vision to a number of mediated sources – I will pick up on the idea of 

mediation later – and, perhaps, through Stieglitz.17  

It is true that Coppola would return to Europe within a few months with a view to 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 6 

becoming not a photographer but an art critic. However, is it not strange that someone 

whose plan was to join the Department of Photography at the University of Marburg, part 

of the Art History Department under Richard Hamann, should be indifferent to all things 

photographic, including to the New Objectivity (the dominant trend in the German 

artistic landscape), during that first trip?18 I find this scenario highly unlikely, if self-

defeating. How else could we explain the neue Optik of Coppola’s bird’s eye view of the 

two ships and the three small boats in Puerto, Vuelta de Rocha (Port, Vuelta de Rocha) 

(1931) – published as part of his photo-essay Siete temas – whose similarity to Moholy-

Nagy’s high-angle photograph of a little boat and a sailing vessel in Boat is arresting, or 

the extreme vertical shot in Calle Corrientes 3060 (3060 Corrientes Street) (1931) (figure 

2) and its extraordinary kinship with Rodchenko’s Arbat, Street Traffic (1932), André 

Kertész’s Crossroads, Blois (1930), and Moholy-Nagy’s Gangplank from Above (1930)? 

Coppola’s and Moholy-Nagy’s photographs in particular are panegyrics on geometry 

whose striking similarity, both in conception and execution, is evident in their focus on 

the round, flat-shaped hats, the rectangular block pavement, and the feast of parallel and 

intersecting lines that define the composition.19 How should we interpret the obvious 

dialogue between his low-angle photographs of trees in Pulmón de manzana (Block 

Lung) (1931) and Rodchenko’s Pine Tree, Pushkino (1927), or between his industrial 

themes in a number of pictures captioned ‘Buenos Aires, 1931’ and in Portón y Grúa 

(Crane) (1931) (figure 3), and Albert Renger-Patzsch’s industrial photographs or 

Germaine Krull’s Métal (1928) (figure 4), which, like Crane, aestheticises the fortuitous 

geometry of tower cranes?20 What are we supposed to make of the factory funnels of 

Puerto (Port) (1931) (figure 5) when faced with those of Renger-Patzsch – in 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 7 

photographs like Zeche ‘Viktoria Mathias’ in Essen (Viktoria Mathias Mine in Essen 

(Viktoria Mathias Mine in Essen) (1929), 21  the vertical projection of the three 

smokestacks in the background whose top end is deliberately left out of the frame, is 

figuratively rendered infinite, suggesting an apotheosis of industrial modernity – and 

those of Charles Sheeler, notably his photographs of the Ford Motor Company’s new 

River-Rouge plant in 1927, or his fixation with shadows, a leitmotif of the New Vision?22 

Almost all of Coppola’s 1931 high-angle pictures taken from his house on 3060 

Corrientes Street are formal studies of shadow and so is Mateo y su victoria (Mateo and 

his Victoria) (1931) (figure 6). A ‘defence of a shadow’, in Jorge Schwartz’s terms, this 

high-angle photograph of a man, his cart, and their projected shadows on the street is 

rotated to grant autonomy to the shadow. Coppola ‘seems to breathe life into these 

shadows, endowing them with the illusion of independence’, says Schwartz, pointing out 

that ‘the Bauhaus made great use of shadow photography’. He offers as an example Otto 

Umbehr (known as Umbo), ‘a leading photographer of the German School’ who ‘even 

managed to take a photo of his shadow projected onto his own body’.23 It is true that 

Mateo and his Victoria bears strong resemblance to Umbo’s The Eerie Street (1928).24 

Shot vertically from a high-angle, the latter captures the unheimlich shadows of two 

pedestrians and a man on his cycle cart. The otherworldly shadows grow into 

autonomous entities, dwarfing the human figures from which they emanate.25 

 Scholars agree that the ‘radical’ turn in Coppola’s aesthetics, what Luis Priamo 

dubs ‘this gigantic jump’, occurred in 1931, immediately after his first trip to Europe.26 

The Argentine readily confirmed various visits to contemporary art exhibitions, his 

familiarisation with the Italian Novecento (‘in Rome, an exhibition of work by Umberto 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 8 

Boccioni introduced me to Il Novecento’), and his purchase of Élie Faure’s Histoire de 

l’art (1919–1921), which formed ‘the basis of [his] studies’.27 David Oubiña informs us 

that during those trips to Europe, Coppola acquired ‘numerous books and journals’ on 

film that would later constitute the ‘nucleus’ of his personal library, and that 

‘significantly, his collection does not abound in books of photography of that time’.28 A 

known cinephile by then, Coppola’s interest in publications on cinema was hardly 

surprising, but his silence about photography was, and so were his later efforts to 

downplay his sojourn at the Berlin Bauhaus and any possible impact the director of the 

photography workshop, Walter Peterhans, may have had on his work. ‘A mathematician 

and an exquisite photographer’, noted Coppola with respect to Peterhans whom he met 

through his future wife, Grete Stern, ‘didn’t actually teach photography; he just ran the 

workshop. […] Everything that they have written about me studying photography at the 

Bauhaus, is complete nonsense. I did eighteen photos at the Bauhaus workshop. In any 

case, working there was a very simple business, there was no discussion of the 

photographs’. 29  Priamo, among others, indicates that Coppola ‘always dismissed 

Peterhans’s influence on his photography’, citing as examples his post-Bauhaus use of 

the medium format and tripod, both amply employed by Peterhans, as opposed to 

shooting with a 35mm lens, which he did prior to his time at the Bauhaus.30 Likewise, 

Coppola maintained a fairly hostile attitude towards Moholy-Nagy (who had already left 

the Bauhaus by the time the Argentine arrived), probably because of his anti-figurative 

work.31 

 In many ways, Coppola methodically cultivated the image of a photographer born 

‘modern’. In his ‘Autobiographical Text’, published in 1994, he eagerly admitted the 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 9 

influence of film directors, painters, authors, poets, art critics, musicians, musicologists, 

philosophers, psychologists, architects, literary groups and journals, but made no mention 

of photography, save the cursory statement, ‘Photography from Nadar to Edward Weston, 

from D. O. Hill to Alfred Stieglitz and my contemporaries’, which appeared to obscure 

more than it clarified. 32  The reference to a couple of pioneer nineteenth-century 

photographers, both dead by the time he took his first picture, and to American straight 

photography did not throw light on his photographic borrowings, nor did the passing note 

on European avant-garde photographers, lumped under the elusive category ‘my 

contemporaries’. I will return to this point later; for the moment, it should be added that 

the only photographer Coppola recognised as his mentor was his elder brother Armando 

(1886–1957). Priamo sees the two brothers happily coinciding in their treatment of still 

lifes. Armando’s amateur photography, he says, was ‘far removed from the artistic 

clichés of the time’, but unfortunately it is hard to know whether he was, in fact, in touch 

with post-pictorialist developments in the United States and in Europe in the 1910s and 

1920s.33 

 Schwartz draws a list of publications on photography that were circulating in 

Europe and could have caught the eye of the photographer in the early months of 1931. 

Apart from Moholy-Nagy’s book-cum-manifesto, there were Franz Roh’s trilingual Foto-

Auge (Photo-Eye) (1929), published as an informal companion to the biggest 

photographic event of the decade, the Film und Foto exhibition held in Stuttgart from 

May to July 1929, Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) (1928), as 

well as Germaine Krull’s Métal (1926) and 100 x Paris (1929).34 Added to these were 

Erich Mendelsohn’s widely distributed Amerika. Bilderbuch eines Architekten (America: 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 10 

An Architect’s Picture Book) (1926), Renger-Patzsch’s Die Welt ist schön (The World is 

Beautiful) (1928), Werner Graeff’s Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here Comes the New 

Photographer) (1929), and Roh’s L. Moholy Nagy: 60 Fotos (1930).35 Schwartz argues 

that the texts and photographs published in Moholy-Nagy’s, Roh’s, Krull’s, and 

Blossfeldt’s books ‘had a decisive influence on Coppola’s development as a photographer 

during this experimental period’, noting that this ‘influence is apparent in Ángulo de 

escalera [Corner of Staircase], the same photo enlarged in positive and negative, 

produced in 1929’ (figure 7).36 Despite the strong currency of negatives in experimental 

photography, observes Schwartz, for Coppola negative prints were extremely rare – a fact 

which I believe suggests not a synchrony with but an awareness of the visual language of 

the European avant-garde.37 Although he does not elaborate further on this point, his use 

of the term ‘influence’ is crucial because it implies direct contact with European 

photography already by 1929 – in other words, it indicates that Coppola must have seen 

some of the experimental pictures of the New Vision. In this light, the assertions made so 

far by Brizuela and myself do not take full stock of Coppola’s radical vision, which may 

have culminated in 1931, but had, in fact, cropped up in 1927, in the tilted objectivity of 

his first known photograph Mundo propio (One’s Own World) (figure 8), and 

materialised two years later in the experimental duo Corner of Staircase (positive and 

negative).  

 The high-angle photograph in Corner of Staircase (figure 7) and the tilted frame in 

Materiales de construcción (Construction Materials) (1929) (figure 9) were in perfect 

tune not only with the New Vision, but also with Coppola’s own 1931 photographs. His 

‘modern’ vision was also evident in his pictures of medianeras (sidewalls), a favourite 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 11 

theme of the New Objectivity exemplified, for instance, in Franz Lenk’s painting Berlin 

Tenements (1929) and Renger-Patzsch’s photograph Cityscape of Meideirich (1930), and 

in his numerous photographs of the streets and whitewashed houses around the 

Maldonado stream, all taken in 1929. 38  The Sachlichkeit, or materialism, of these 

pictures, the tilted camera and the experimentation with negatives, all vouch for 

Coppola’s pre-1931 neue Auge – an idea endorsed by Priamo who traces a firm 

continuity between Corner of Staircase (figure 7), Construction Materials (figure 9), and 

San Gimignano (1931) in terms of subject and formal approach.39 The same continuity 

can be seen in the Sachlichkeit of Construction Materials, the Barricas, Ramos Mejía 

(Barrels, Ramos Mejía) (1929), and Buenos Aires (1931) (figure 10).40 Juan Manuel 

Bonet reaches a similar conclusion when he corroborates that Coppola’s pictures 

demonstrate that already by the end of the 1920s the photographer ‘had assimilated from 

a distance and in a fragmentary fashion’ the visual idiom of Neue Sachlichkeit and the 

New Vision.41 

 Whence this conceptual and formal affinity, if not from direct contact with the 

visual lexicon of avant-garde photography? Coppola’s aesthetic outfit could not have 

been fashioned out of thin air. It is my contention that the Argentine must have been 

aware firsthand of contemporary European and North American photography prior to 

1931. Pictorialist Argentina may have been cut off from the latest happenings in the field, 

as Priamo affirms, but this does not mean that the sizeable crowd of Argentine artists and 

intellectuals with long sojourns in Europe had not carried in their luggage some of the 

books and magazines on photography circulating there, which the young Coppola, who 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 12 

was moving within a context that was au fait with the European art scene, could have 

consulted.42 

Those who are still inclined to veto a direct connection with avant-garde 

photography (something I would be reluctant to do) are left with a number of mediated 

influences that have been instrumental in furnishing Coppola’s pre-1931 approach to 

photography. There seems to be a consensus among scholars that the strongest among 

those influences was European avant-garde film. Oubiña confirms that by 1930 Coppola 

was abreast of all things cinematic originating in Europe. 43  Having co-founded 

Argentina’s Film Club in 1929 and acted as its secretary, he was in step with the most 

recent novelties in Russian, German, and French filmography.44 The fifteen screenings 

organised between 21 August and 27 November 1929 at the Amigos del Arte, a cultural 

institution whose agenda was the wide dissemination of avant-garde aesthetics, included 

the Russian fathers of montage Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and 

October (1925), Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927), and Vertov’s 

The Sixth Part of the World (1926).45 The Club also presented Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: 

Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) and Man Ray’s The Sea Star (1928). The screenings 

were accompanied by introductory lectures on German cinema and Ruttmann’s film (by 

Guillermo de Torre), French cinema (by Romero Brest), Soviet cinema (by José Luis 

Romero), and the technical evolution of cinema (by León Klimovsky). Luis Buñuel’s Un 

Chien andalou (1929) was screened only two months after its premiere in Paris and 

before its first screening in Madrid.46  

In his 1930 note ‘“El Cineclub” de Buenos Aires’, published in La Gaceta 

Literaria, de Torre singled out the group’s interest in Soviet cinema. ‘The most 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 13 

significant novelty of the Cineclub of Buenos Aires in relation to all the other similar 

clubs in Europe’, he wrote, ‘is the abundance of Soviet Russian “films”, of those that 

European censorship proscribes but here are shown publicly and without much 

astonishment’.47 Coppola’s familiarity with Russian cinematography is key both to fixing 

a direct link between his photographic and cinematic output, particularly his experimental 

documentary short Así nació el obelisco (This is how the Obelisk was Born) (1936), and 

to setting up a nexus of triangular relationships that intimate at least an indirect linkage 

with Rodchenko via Vertov and Eisenstein.48 The latter’s influence on Rodchenko, who 

had designed the poster for The Battleship Potemkin, is salient in Steps (1929), a high-

angle, tilted shot of a woman carrying her child up a series of steps. Richard Whelan is 

convinced that Rodchenko ‘must have remembered at some level the famous scene in 

Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 movie The Battleship Potemkin showing the Cossack massacre 

of civilians – including a woman with a child on the steps – leading down to the harbor of 

Odessa’.49 Could a kindred triangle, via Vertov and Eisenstein, lie behind Coppola’s 

Rodchenkoesque angles and unorthodox camera frames? The same applies to Ruttmann’s 

Berlin, which could have been a wonderful pre-Bauhaus study in Neue Sachlichkeit for 

the receptive young photographer. The film, writes Nora Alter, makes use of an 

‘entfesselte, or “unleashed”, camera that roams throughout the city ostensibly 

indiscriminately filming whatever comes into its path’.50 The protagonist, the city itself, 

unfolds its character in a series of what could be described as sharp-focused stills insofar 

as motion remains external to the camera, stemming either from people or moving objects 

such as vehicles and factory machines. Through a mostly static camera (except for 

tracking shots), Ruttmann seizes the movement of the modern metropolis generally 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 14 

without pan-tilt and enhances it through montage. Paul Grainge and others see Berlin as a 

paradigm of ‘the cold and savage beauty of New Objectivity’ in cinema, while Alter 

observes that ‘the cult of the thing, or the object is integral’ to the film. She explains that 

the ‘purported aim’ of the New Objectivity was ‘to focus on nonmediated perception, on 

the discovery, description, and perceptual account of things as they were’, and considers 

Ruttmann’s visual narrative to be ‘steadfast in its belief in realism and its pursuit of 

objectivity’. 51  Ruttmann’s uncompromising objectivity bears the hallmark of New 

Objectivity photography as this crystallises, for instance, in the work of Renger-Patzsch, 

who by the late 1920s had become the movement’s major spokesperson with polemical 

texts that targeted Moholy-Nagy’s experimentalism, accusing him of being ‘an amateur 

pictorialist in modern dress’.52  

In reality, Renger-Patzsch’s industrial photographs could have been perfectly 

taken from Ruttmann’s Berlin. The factory funnels of Viktoria Mathias Mine in Essen 

and Eiserne Hand Mine in Essen (1929), the silos of Gutehoffnungshütte Blast Furnace 

Works in Duisburg (1928), and the furnace in Chimney Seen from Below, Herrenwyk 

Blast Furnace Works, Lübeck (1928),53 share the same visual vocabulary with the four 

factory funnels squeezed between two buildings in Act I of Ruttmann’s film (11 min 55 

sec) – and, as we have seen, with Coppola’s Port (figure 5). The same applies to 

Ruttmann’s bottle-capping machine (figure 11) and Renger-Patzsch’s Shoemaking Irons, 

Fagus Works, Alfeld (1926).54 The focus on the object itself – the milk bottles in the case 

of Ruttmann, the shoemaking irons in that of Renger-Patzsch – bespeaks the New 

Objectivity’s fixation with the materiality of the thing and its objective representation, a 

kind of a double-edged ‘objectivity’. The sequence in the factory in particular (12 min 33 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 15 

sec–14 min 50 sec) reflects the matter-of-fact approach to industrial materiality as we 

come across it in Renger-Patzsch’s celebrated photographs of the Fagus and Krupp 

factories. We may safely assume that in 1929 Ruttmann’s fixed-point camera must have 

offered the young Coppola an education in the aesthetics of Neue Sachlichkeit, especially 

if we think of his Construction Materials (figure 9), of the formal and conceptual 

‘objectivity’ of his medianeras and his Maldonado prints, all photographed in 1929, as 

well as of photographs like Sin título (Untitled) (1931), whose resemblance to 

Ruttmann’s bottle-capping machine is striking (figures 11, 12). Coppola’s acquaintance 

with European avant-garde cinema in August 1929 is at least partly responsible for the 

burst of the modern that we see in his photographs of that same year. 

Machinery and industrial themes may have been woven into the visual fabric of 

the New Vision in general, but they evidently found a most straightforward rendering in 

the hands of Neue Sachlichkeit photographers. As already mentioned, the New 

Objectivity, which had begun as the Weimar era’s representational art around 1919, 

called for a ‘return to a tangible objectivity’ that ‘dominated all other painting styles’ 

throughout the 1920s. Urban and industrial sceneries were stock motifs in the work of 

German painters belonging to the more conservative strand of Neue Sachlichkeit.55 In 

Argentina, they emerged in the paintings of Coppola’s mentor, Alfredo Guttero, who had 

spent over two decades in Europe before his definitive return to Buenos Aires in 1927. 

Up until his death five years later, Guttero acted, in de Torre’s words, as the ‘dean’ of the 

new generation of Argentine painters, and as a ‘cultural operator’ who, according to 

Eduardo Costantini, ‘confronted the most conservative art tendencies’ in the country 

through participation in juries, educational projects and publications, and the organisation 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 16 

of various exhibitions.56 Adrián Gorelik states that Guttero was, in fact, ‘the only artist 

that Coppola recognised as having a direct influence on the shaping of his approach’, 

while María Teresa Constantin remarks that elements of the work of New Objectivity 

artists of the Weimar Republic, notably ‘regular volumes, indebted to the new 

architectural materials and to functionality, doubtlessly evoke Guttero’. Constantin, who 

speaks of Guttero’s industrial paintings dating from 1928 and 1929, quotes a comment on 

the ‘winds of change blowing in Berlin’ that the artist made in a letter to his friend and 

sculptor Luis Falcini in 1921. Guttero, says Constantin, ‘is referring to the Neue 

Sachlichkeit’. She points out that the painter ‘shows complete trust in Argentina’s 

industrial development’, as did several New Objectivity artists and photographers who 

took up Germany’s interwar faith in industry.57 The Neue Sachlichkeit search for a 

revamped realism formed part of ‘the international climate of the return to order’ that 

occurred in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, and involved a raft of 

aesthetic movements, including the Italian Novecento and its call for a ‘return to rational, 

ordered painting’.58 Constantin draws attention to the link between the New Objectivity 

and Italian Novecento, noting that in both cases ‘man behaves a bit like a machine’.59 

 The generation of Argentine artists who travelled to Europe from 1923 onward, 

according to Patricia Artundo, ‘worked in an environment that emphasized overcoming 

the aesthetic and artistic questioning of the historical avant-garde and recovering the 

classical tradition’.60 Guttero, of course, had experiential knowledge of the fermentation 

that was taking place in the cauldron of European art. In another letter to Falcini dated 

1925, he spoke highly of the Novecento exhibition at the 14th Venice Bienniale. The 

galleries of Novecento art, he wrote, are ‘the best in the entire exhibition due to their firm 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 17 

grip of modernity, the soundness of the works and the certain tastes that they 

demonstrate’.61 Guttero’s familiarity with the Novecento and the New Objectivity is 

manifest in his industrial landscapes from 1928. The Elevadores de granos (Grain 

Elevators) (1928) (figure 13), with the imposing salmon-coloured building at the centre-

left of the composition, the metallic bridge that divides the painting horizontally and the 

silos in the background, approximates Carl Grossberg’s Brücke über die 

Schwarzbachstraße in Wuppertal (Bridge over Schwarzbach Street in Wuppertal) (figure 

14), with its striking brick-red bridge pylons and the sharp-focused background buildings. 

Notwithstanding that both painters make use of light-green, grey and ochre, Guttero’s 

more pastel-like colours set him apart from the sharpness in form and colour that one 

encounters in Grossberg. Pastel-like colours are more pronounced in Silo, Silos (ca. 1928) 

and Puerto (1928), the geometricised cityscape of Sin título (Untitled), and the industrial 

topography of Paisaje de Puerto Nuevo (Landscape of Puerto Nuevo) (1928) (figure 15), 

whose three factory funnels against the left background break further away from 

Grossberg’s punctilious stroke at the same time that they chime in harmoniously with the 

visual idiom of straight photography and the New Objectivity, as seen in the work of 

Sheeler, Renger-Patzsch, Ruttmann and Coppola, among scores of others (figure 5).62  

Guttero’s Grain Elevators and Landscape of Puerto Nuevo betray a strong 

conceptual and to a certain degree formal kinship with the quest of the New Objectivity 

for Sachlichkeit, making them another odds-on favourite for bringing Coppola closer to 

the movement’s cult of the object. As Schwartz affirms, Guttero’s ‘tubular silos, 

monumental in their volumetric geometry […] were essential in shaping Coppola’s 

approach’.63 Coppola met Guttero when the latter opened his fourth ‘one-man show’ at 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 18 

the Amigos del Arte on 30 September 1929, where he most likely exhibited his industrial 

sceneries.64 Impressed by the exhibition, the young Coppola gave Guttero a six-page-long 

letter discussing his paintings, while their meeting signalled the beginning of a long 

‘friendship and a partnership’.65 Clearly, Guttero’s role was key to keeping Coppola au 

courant with the latest developments in the European art scene and the retour à l’ordre. 

In his ‘Autobiographical Text’, the photographer reveals that it was Guttero who in 1929 

‘urged’ him to travel to Europe and ‘planned an itinerary’ (containing several visits to 

museum and galleries, such as the Novecento exhibition in Rome mentioned earlier) 

which he ‘duly followed’ a year later.66  

To paraphrase Gorelik, the year 1929 and more specifically the months from 

August to November were Coppola’s menses mirabiles67 since, to his crash course in 

European avant-garde cinema and his discovery of Guttero’s work, we should add the ten 

lectures on architecture that Le Corbusier gave at the Amigos del Arte and the Faculty of 

Exact Sciences in Buenos Aires in October 1929. 68  Nurtured on the principles of 

constructivism and functionalism, Le Corbusier’s abstract architecture fascinated 

Coppola who, lured by the ‘modern’ vision of the Swiss architect, would later recall his 

lectures, particularly ‘his survey of Buenos Aires, on which [his] future photographs 

would be based’.69 In his 1995 interview with Gorelik, Coppola harped on the ‘decisive 

influence’ that Le Corbusier had exerted on his ‘way of seeing the city’.70 The latter 

severely criticised Buenos Aires for its lack of green areas and its anachronistic use of the 

cuadrícula, or Spanish-square planning, describing it as ‘one of the most inhuman cities 

[he] [had] known’.71 For all Coppola’s emphasis on the impact Le Corbusier had on his 

work, the grid system that the Swiss shunned so vehemently was, in fact, wholeheartedly 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 19 

cherished by the Argentine. Testimony to this is a photograph of a whitewashed suburban 

house taken in 1929 and rephotographed seven years later for the purposes of his album 

Buenos Aires 1936 (figures 16, 17).72 The change of angle in the retake, says Gorelik, 

resulted in the accentuated esquina (corner), which constitutes ‘one of the key points in 

understanding the grid system’, the real theme of the photograph, according to the 

original title: Esquina en las antiguas orillas. Calle Paraguay al 2600 (Street Corner in 

the Old Limits of the City. 2600 Paraguay Street). Coppola’s ‘1936 “corrections” to the 

1929 photograph’, the scholar rightly concludes, ‘can be seen as a subtle defence of the 

block’, especially because this is the only photograph known to have been repeated by 

Coppola.73  

In a typical avant-garde gesture, Le Corbusier attributed aesthetic quality to the 

suburban little houses. Through ‘the ennobling of the banal’,74 he made use of the image 

of porteño immigrant housing to eschew European architectural academicism which, in 

his view and in that of many others in the audience, had plagued Buenos Aires as a 

consequence of the longstanding Eurocentrism of its political élite. From the Europhile 

president Bernardino Rivadavia, under whose governance the French neoclassical façade 

of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Buenos Aires was completed in 1926, to the so-called 

Generation of the 1880s, who, in an attempt to distance themselves from anything that 

could hark them back to the colonial past, asserted an eclecticism that drew heavily and 

often uncritically on French, German, and British architecture, any traces of colonial 

architecture in the capital city were systematically wiped out, giving way to a hotchpotch 

of European architectural styles. Le Corbusier asked his audience to turn their back on 

academicism and instead embrace the popular cubism of the little houses. ‘You have 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 20 

this’, he professed, ‘a standard plan, and a play of forms in the Argentine light, a play of 

very beautiful, very pure forms. Look!’. The study of this ‘folklore for mass production’, 

he reasoned, could give rise to ‘a pure functional organism’. 75  Enraptured by the 

architect’s appraisal of popular functionalist architecture, Coppola clung to the 

spontaneous cubism of the immigrant houses for their alleged affinity with architectural 

modernism. The assumed connection between the simple, functional, and nondecorative 

structure of the suburban houses and interwar modernist architecture was also 

underscored by the German architect and city planner Werner Hegemann, who visited 

Buenos Aires following an invitation from the Amigos de la Ciudad two years later. For 

Hegemann, the cubist precepts of contemporary European architecture did not have to be 

imported to South America because they emanated ‘naturally’ from its own ‘healthy 

tradition’. ‘Even today’, he posited, ‘construction companies erect thousands of small 

houses that fall completely within classic form, houses which have been simplified and 

stripped of baroque trappings, giving themselves wholeheartedly and innocently to a very 

modern materialism [Sachlichkeit]’.76 By shooting the Sachlichkeit of the little houses, 

the Argentine kept pace, among others, with the most recent happenings in the European 

art world. This keenness on functionalism and materialism through Le Corbusier 

bespeaks yet another oblique link with Neue Sachlichkeit. 

The year 1929 may signal Coppola’s immersion in European art, but the 

photographer had plugged into it since at least 1924 with the appearance of Martín Fierro 

(1924–1927), the country’s most important avant-garde magazine, which he ‘used to buy 

at the news-stand’ on the way back from the Mariano Moreno secondary school.77 Ever 

since, his acquaintances, friendships, and collaborations with intellectuals and artists, 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 21 

some of them prominent members of the Buenos Aires avant-garde, kept him up to date 

with aesthetic gestation across Europe. Among them, for example, we find Jorge Luis 

Borges, a leading figure of the literary avant-garde with whom Coppola ventured his 

‘long walks around Maldonado’, taking pictures of suburban neighbourhoods and houses 

(figure 16),78 and de Torre, his partner at the Cine Club, the Amigos del Arte, and the 

Martín Fierro group, and co-founder of the influential Spanish magazine La Gaceta 

Literaria (1927–1932), the main vehicle for the dissemination of European avant-garde 

art and literature in Spain and Spanish America, with a wide distribution in Argentina. 

Essays on German Expressionism, the New Objectivity, Cubism, and Italian Futurism 

populated the pages of La Gaceta during the five years of its circulation. By the time de 

Torre moved to Argentina (he married Borges’s sister, Norah), he had already published 

his book Literaturas europeas de vanguardia (European Avant-Garde Literatures) 

(1925), which made a strong impression in Latin America, becoming, in the words of the 

Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, ‘a kind of Bible’ for Latin American literati.79 De Torre, 

whom Ernesto Giménez Caballero, the co-founder of La Gaceta, considered an authority 

on avant-gardism ‘for his extraordinary erudition in all the -isms’, was no doubt key to 

Coppola’s aesthetic education and particularly to his attunement to the new artistic 

vocabularies of Europe.80 While in Argentina, de Torre continued to act as La Gaceta’s 

secretary until 1929, and contributed regularly to José Ortega y Gasset’s legendary 

journal Revista de Occidente between 1923 and 1936. Coppola, who had subscribed to 

the Revista in 1925, read Ortega y Gasset’s influential essay El tema de nuestro tiempo 

(The Modern Theme) (1923), after being prompted by Francisco Romero, who would 

later become ‘one of Argentina’s most outstanding philosophers’.81 It was there, observes 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 22 

Gonzalo Aguilar in a note, where the Spaniard ‘expound[ed] his rejection of rationalism 

and relativism in favour of “perspectivism” and his doctrine of the point of view, which 

can also be traced in Coppola’s definition of the “imagema”’. ‘Ortega’s powerful 

influence’, continues Aguilar, is also ‘evident in Coppola’s use, in essays, of quotations 

from articles and books by Ortega generally published by Revista de Occidente’.82 In the 

tenth chapter of The Modern Theme, entitled ‘The Doctrine of the Point of View’, the 

Spanish philosopher considered perspective as ‘one of the component parts of reality’, 

arguing that ‘a reality which remained the same from whatever point of view it was 

observed would be a ridiculous conception’.83 This admittedly resonated with the young 

Coppola, who would soon adopt the maverick perspectives of the New Vision, but also 

with Romero, a philosopher preoccupied with the notion of historical perspective and a 

major translator of works from German into Spanish.84 Like de Torre, Romero, whom 

Coppola viewed as ‘a brother and mentor’,85 must have played a crucial role in making 

Coppola conversant with the latest intellectual developments in Europe, while Ortega 

helped him fashion his unorthodox visuality quite early on, a fact that would later allow 

him to feel at home with the new visual glossaries of Europe and the United States.  

Coppola’s dialogue with European and North American photography is evident in 

his pictures and theoretical writings alike. The text accompanying the invitation leaflet 

for what is widely held as the first exhibition of modern photography in Argentina, a joint 

enterprise of Coppola and Stern at the offices of Sur in 1935, was, according to the 

former, a reproduction of a text written by Peterhans.86 Christopher Phillips explains that 

Peterhans’s philosophy ‘was considerably closer to Renger-Patzsch’s than to Moholy’.87 

The text spotlighted ‘the free, subjective activity of the photographer’, whose selection of 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 23 

the object presupposed a personal understanding: ‘the photographer expresses his 

intuition of the object, his understanding, his knowledge of the object’ and in so doing, he 

provides ‘an essentially new opportunity for knowing and expressing, thanks to its 

specific ability to detail and “highlight” the reality of those people and things’.88 The text 

of the invitation was cast in the same conceptual mould as Strand’s manifesto on straight 

photography. ‘It is in the organization of this objectivity that the photographer’s point of 

view toward Life enters in’, avowed Strand in 1917,89 and his remarks were echoed by 

Ortega y Gasset, who, a year earlier, had published his first formulation of perspectivism 

in El Espectador.90 Far from ‘disturbing’ the ‘fabric’ of ‘reality’, argued Ortega y Gasset, 

perspective constitutes reality’s ‘organising element’. ‘The persistent error that has 

hitherto been made’, he wrote, ‘is the supposition that reality possesses in itself, 

independently of the point of view from which it is observed, a physiognomy of its 

own’. 91  At more or less the same time, Ortega y Gasset and Strand understood 

perspective as a constitutive element of reality, and spoke of a new way of seeing. The 

philosopher and the photographer coincided in their novel mode of θεωρεῖν (to observe, 

contemplate, theorise), and so did Coppola about a decade later. We may never ascertain 

whether the Argentine became acquainted with the work of Strand via Ocampo in 1930, 

but we do know that by then he was at ease with Strand’s vision thanks to his early 

attachment to Ortega y Gasset’s perspectivist theory. 

Commenting on Strand, Joel Eisinger stresses that ‘despite his claims for the 

objectivity of photography and his demand that the photographer respect the thing in 

front of the camera, Strand still thought of serious photography as expression, as 

something guided by intuitive knowledge’. The debate on the ‘straightness’ or ‘purity’ of 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 24 

American photography, adds Eisinger, ‘paralleled one then taking place in Germany 

among critics of Neue Sachlichkeit photography’. 92  Coppola’s and Peterhans’s 

statements, for instance, summoned up Roh’s 1925 definition of magical realist (or New 

Objectivity) painting – namely his thesis that ‘to depict realistically is not to portray or 

copy but rather to build rigorously, to construct objects that exist in the world in their 

particular primordial shape’.93  

Coppola’s and Peterhans’s insistence on the ability of the photographer to create, 

through her or his intuitive perception and personal optik, ‘new’ opportunities for 

epistemic breakthroughs by offering novel views of reality, is equally impregnated with 

the New Vision quest for a radical change of our perspective and, more generally, the 

avant-garde search for a new sensibility. ‘We don’t see what we look at. We don’t see the 

extraordinary perspectives, the foreshortenings, and positions of objects. We who are 

accustomed to seeing the usual, the accepted, must reveal the world of sight. We must 

revolutionize our visual reasoning’, declared Rodchenko in 1928.94 Three years earlier, 

Moholy-Nagy had announced the advent of a new vision: ‘We may say that we see the 

world with entirely different eyes’. The latter held that ‘the photographic camera [can] 

make visible existences which cannot be perceived or taken in by our optical instrument, 

the eye; i.e. the photographic camera can either complete or supplement our optical 

instrument, the eye’.95 An almost identical comment was made by Coppola in his essay 

‘On Photography’ (possibly co-authored with Stern), which was published in the third 

issue of Campo Grafico: Rivista di Estetica e di Tecnica Grafica in Milan in 1937: ‘We 

look with our eyes and we see things, objects. Only rarely do we look at objects in order 

to see them for themselves’, he wrote.96 He concluded:  



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 25 

 

These objects are made of a given material, they have a given surface, shape, 

colour, volume. A book is smooth or rough paper, ink, a number of pages, a 

prism. This material, this surface, shape, volume, reflects part of the light that 

illuminates it; they are visible objects, objects that exist for the camera. […] In 

certain cases, these bodies may only reflect part of the light; like infrared rays, 

they are not visible to the human eye, but they are visible to the camera.97 

 

The text sounds like a redrafting of Renger-Patzsch’s Sachlichkeit aesthetics. ‘To capture 

impressions of nature, plants, animals, works by architects and sculptors, engineers and 

technicians’, the German photographer postulated in his 1927 article ‘Goals’, ‘we have 

the most appropriate tool at our disposal in photography. [….] The individualized 

structure of wood, stone and metal can be depicted exceptionally well, and in a manner 

that would be impossible to achieve with the means available to the visual arts’. Also, he 

added in defence of a purely factual photography: ‘The absolute correct reproduction of 

form, the subtlety of shading from the highest point of light to the deepest shadow, 

confers on the technically excellent photograph the magic of the experience itself’.98 

 Renger-Patzsch’s appeal for faithfulness to the material was shared by Coppola 

and so was Moholy-Nagy’s and Ortega y Gasset’s perspectivism. ‘An image’, clarified 

Coppola, ‘is obtained of the shape of the object and its volume, which can be 

characterised as an image from a point of view’.99 Each photograph yields an individual 

point of view, in the same way that, according to Ortega y Gasset, ‘all knowledge is 

knowledge from a definite point of view’. ‘By setting everyone’s fragmentary visions 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 26 

side-by-side’, the latter argued, ‘it would be possible to achieve a complete panorama of 

absolute and universally valid truth’.100 Coppola reiterates Ortega y Gasset’s notion of 

visual and epistemic fragmentation: ‘The photographic image is a fragment of reality. 

[…] The photographic image is the image of a fragment of reality: it is a rectangle which 

exactly individualises that fragment, limiting it, separating it, framing it as a new visual 

unit’.101 The same statement is repeated in his ‘Definition of Imagema’, originally 

published in 1994: ‘My work is an optical image of the real, transcribed by the camera 

and obtained in the final image, it is the proof of my authorship: a proof, an apparent 

fragment of reality, the creature of my vision, now released’.102 As in his 1935 text, 

Coppola brings together objectivity and expressiveness, as did Strand, albeit unwillingly, 

in his 1917 manifesto, at the same time that he conjures up Rodchenko’s call for a new 

visual idiom. ‘The faithfulness of photography is the element itself’, he notes, ‘bent to the 

will of the photographer who aims to fix on paper his vision of the visible reality’. 

Photography, insists Coppola, ‘is an instrument at the service of anyone aware of that 

reality’.103 

 Coppola’s major theorisation of the medium is found in ‘Imagema’, a leaflet that 

the photographer used for his exhibition 40 años de fotografía (Forty Years of 

Photography), which was held at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires in 1969. I 

say ‘major’ because, temporally distant from the shocks and jolts of the avant-garde, this 

was his bid to afford a fairly idiosyncratic account of his photographic vision, one that 

nevertheless still bore visible traces of an avant-gardist past. Cited in the epigraph to the 

text, Paul Valéry’s words could have come out of the mouth of any New Vision 

photographer: ‘To see all the things in the world as if they had never yet been seen’.104 In 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 27 

a typically straight photography and New Objectivity fashion, Coppola maintained that 

‘IMAGEMA is pure reality; it is the image in its essential being’. For him, ‘this pure 

reality is born visible, it becomes visible through the contact […] of the subject who is 

looking with the object looked at’. Referring to the faithfulness, or objectivity, of 

photography, he explained that ‘THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE matches the image on 

the human retina, but our perception of that image is not necessarily faithful’. We learn 

that this is because ‘the psyche, with all its emotions, all its private complexities, 

conscious or unconscious, partially ignores – sometimes totally ignores – that part of the 

image not related to a given act, to the object’s function’. Free from this emotive 

dimension, the camera lens ‘allows us to capture pure reality, its visible elemental being, 

its imagema’.105 To some extent, of course, Coppola’s argument implodes because the 

non-emotive objectivity of the camera is tainted with the subjectivity of the eye of the 

photographer, who organises this objectivity, and with that of the viewer, who sees and 

necessarily interprets it through emotive mechanisms – Roland Barthes’s punctum, or 

personal meaning, is highly relevant here.106 Siegfried Kracauer was quick to undercut 

the claims of straight and New Objectivity photography to pure objectivity. ‘Actually 

there is no mirror at all’, he wrote. ‘Photographs do not just copy nature but 

metamorphose it by transferring three-dimensional phenomena to the plane, severing 

their ties with the surroundings, and substituting black, gray, and white for the given 

color schemes’. Kracauer found the most compelling case against the objectivity 

principle ‘in the way in which we take cognisance of visible reality’, which 

‘spontaneously structures the inflowing impressions’.107  



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 28 

Be that as it may, Coppola’s thesis reverberated with Moholy-Nagy’s reflections 

on the supplementary value of the camera vis-à-vis human vision and with Renger-

Patzsch’s reference to the ‘subjective eye’, which ‘views with pleasure the essential 

things and completely overlooks what is unimportant’, while the camera is capable of 

‘see[ing] the essential and inessential with equal clarity’.108 It was also in accord with 

Roh’s belief that New Objectivity painting is able ‘to endow the viewer, who is 

frequently too cursory and careless in his knowledge of the world and in his idealism, 

with a penetrating and meticulous lucidity’.109 Roh’s and Coppola’s reasoning was in line 

with that of New Objectivity artist Grethe Jürgens, who in 1932 joyously spoke of ‘the 

discovery of a totally new world’. ‘One paints pots and rubbish piles’, asserted Jürgens, 

‘and then suddenly sees these things quite differently, as if one had never before seen a 

pot. One paints a landscape, trees, houses, vehicles, and one sees the world anew. One 

discovers like a child an adventure-filled land’.110  

As noted earlier, Coppola’s definition of ‘imagema’ as ‘ONE of the possible 

definitions of the VISIBLE, one of the infinite definitions that light gives to vision’, 

explicitly embraced Ortega y Gasset’s theory of perspectivism and the subjective 

expressiveness of the photographer as ‘author’ of images. The photographer, writes 

Coppola, is ‘the man who looks, sees, finds, invents, CHOOSES what can be illuminated, 

[…] the man who sees the skin of the world, of its gestures, of its perspectives’. And he 

concludes: ‘IMAGEMA; image-testimony, a being that transcends. PHOTOGRAPHY as 

a method, as a philosophy of truth’. 111  Coppola’s final remark champions the 

philosophical underpinnings and epistemological value of the medium, and brings to 

mind the comments Thomas Mann made about Renger-Patzsch’s aesthetic ‘objectivity’. 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 29 

The latter, observed Mann, ‘identified what is individual and objective out of the to-ing 

and fro-ing of the world perceived through the senses, isolated it, elevated it, intensified 

it, rendered it significant, given it a soul’.112 Like Renger-Patzsch, Coppola’s lens shoots 

the essence of the object and, fragmentarily, of the world surrounding it. Seeing 

photographically, to use Weston’s terms,113 is to know. In his ‘Autobiographical Text’, 

the Argentine ponders on the etymological significance of the verb ‘to look’ in Spanish: 

‘I started to look (Spanish mirar, from Latin: mirare, from miror: TO SEE WITH 

WONDER and EAGERLY; from the Sanskrit root: mare, to distinguish)’. The one who 

looks eagerly and respectfully at the object, produces imagemas, or fragments of 

knowledge. Coppola detects this overlap between vision and cognition in the words of the 

French philosopher and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: ‘SEEING. We might 

say that the whole of life lies in that verb – if not ultimately, at least essentially […] [in 

order] to KNOW’.114 The argument on photography as an epistemological tool has 

seemingly run full circle because, from its inception, the medium has been used in 

scientific research, a fact that prompted the pictorialist crusade to restore photography as 

an art form. But in contrast with scientific photography, says Coppola, the 

epistemological value of the medium as art consists not in reproducing external reality 

faithfully, but in ‘seeing’ the essence of that reality, or in seeing it anew. In doing so, the 

art of photography can unlock new layers of meaning, amplifying our scope of visibility. 

Photography and philosophy emerge as two overlapping modes of θεωρεῖν. 

I have argued that while Coppola’s engagement with New Vision and New 

Objectivity photography culminated in the dizzying angles, tilted frames, shadows and 

industrial themes of his 1931 pictures, his dialogue with European avant-garde 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 30 

photography can be traced back at least to the prodigious year of 1929, and more 

specifically to his attention to Sachlichkeit and his formal experimentation. It is clear that 

by 1929, the photographer had already been nurtured by an impressive range of sources, 

some more acknowledged than others and some most likely hushed up. Although he was 

eager to blurt out the impact an architect, a painter, a poet, or a philosopher may have had 

on his work, he was far less keen to disclose his photographic readings, pre- or post-

Bauhaus. As noted earlier, save his brother Armando, the only two twentieth-century 

photographers that Coppola recognised as his ‘maestros’ were American – Stieglitz and 

Weston, both former pictorialists who had espoused straight photography by the early 

1920s.115 ‘He shared the common American anxiety about artistic dependence on Europe 

and wanted independence and international respect for American art’, mentions Eisinger 

with respect to Strand, but his comment could easily apply to Coppola.116 Entangled in 

issues of origin and imitation, different Latin American avant-garde movements sought to 

cut the umbilical cord with Europe in terms of cultural dependence. In Argentina, where 

3,300,000 immigrants arrived, mainly from Italy and Spain, between 1857 and 1914, 

questions of origin and national culture were high on the agendas of politicians and 

literati alike. By 1910, Buenos Aires had transformed from a ‘gran aldea’ (large village) 

and a ‘modest trade and political centre’ of about 180,000 residents in 1870, into ‘a major 

world port and a metropolis with a population of 1,300,000’.117 Crucially, about two-

thirds of those people had not been born in Argentina.118 Foreign-born men, according to 

David Rock, ‘still represented 40 per cent of the male population in 1930’.119 This radical 

alteration of demographics together with rapid urbanisation and modernisation raised 

complex sociopolitical, ideological, and aesthetic issues, one of which was to redefine 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 31 

national cultural identity. Concerned with things Argentine in an era of mass 

immigration, the Buenos Aires avant-garde to which the photographer belonged, 

vacillated between the reformation of national culture and aesthetic renovation through 

the tenets of European avant-garde movements. 

Born into a wealthy family of Italian immigrants who had settled in Argentina in 

the late nineteenth century, ‘Coppola studied at a number of State primary schools, which 

provided a high level education and sought to encourage the integration of Argentina’s 

many immigrants’.120 While still at school, we have seen that he was nourished by the 

aesthetic precepts of the avant-garde magazine Martín Fierro, thus becoming involved in 

the Martinfierristas’ project to revamp national culture very early on. Their vision to 

renew tradition and forge a new aesthetic language which would be at once distinctly 

americano and at pace with aesthetic developments internationally was reflected in the 

choice of name for the magazine: Martín Fierro was the title of Argentina’s national epic 

written by José Hernández between 1872 and 1879. By the late 1910s, Hernández’s 

gauchesque poem, which celebrated the free-spirited gaucho (cowboy) of the Pampa, had 

been canonised based on apparently offering a true image of Argentineness in an age 

when the country’s long-established institutions and structures were being dismantled as 

a result of the massive influx of immigrants and the processes of modernisation. In 

Anthony Giddens’s terms, this radical ‘disembedding’ of traditional social systems and 

cultural codes inaugurated a series of ideological antinomies which dominated the social, 

political and aesthetic debates of the time: rural (the Pampa) or urban (Buenos Aires)? 

Tradition or modernity? American or European?121 Don Segundo Sombra (1926), a novel 

written by Ricardo Güiraldes, a prominent member of the Martín Fierro group, was 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 32 

largely a re-examination of the figure of the gaucho at a time when typical Argentine 

gauchos were disappearing, and a mise-en-scène of those ideological antinomies as it 

held the tensions between a Europeanised lifestyle and a life in the Pampa. 122 

Commenting on a photograph taken at the launch of the book and published in the thirty-

sixth issue of Martín Fierro (12 December 1926), Coppola wrote about the 

Martinfierristas (many of whom were members of the Amigos del Arte): ‘Thirty-three 

people, including Ricardo Güiraldes himself. All, or almost all, the people that were, or 

would shortly be, our betters. My joy: to be their young contemporary’.123 I have already 

argued that Coppola’s apprenticeship in the circles of Martín Fierro and the Amigos del 

Arte, which he described as ‘an exemplary body’ and ‘a varied cultural watershed’, 

shaped his aesthetic outlook and acted as a catalyst for his search for a new visual 

glossary that would allow Argentine art to slip its moorings in Europe and put an end to a 

long history of cultural dependence.124 

For Strand, observes Brizuela, ‘American photographic production was 

unencumbered by the weight of tradition and by the “anxiety of influence”, partly 

because it was such a recent development […] and partly because its practitioners were 

mostly amateurs, not worried with debates about art versus science or technology’.125 The 

same could be said of Argentine photographic production, but unlike Strand, Coppola 

began to mould his visual language when the aesthetics of New Vision and New 

Objectivity photography were already in full swing. ‘Old art’, adds Brizuela with 

reference to Strand, ‘the art of the past symbolized in the medium of painting and in 

pictorialist and figurative aesthetics, belonged in Europe; “new art”, the art of the present 

and of the future was photography and belonged in the USA, the land of amateurs, of 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 33 

self-made men and women, of technology and the real, forceful movement of 

progress’.126 In pictorialist Argentina, Coppola’s photographic idiom was certainly a 

novelty, but his ‘new art’ was as new as that of his contemporaries on both sides of the 

Atlantic. For him, the ‘new art’ of North America, reflected in the likes of Stieglitz and 

Weston, may have been an ally in the battle against cultural dependence, but the same 

was not true for European photography. As a young artist and a member of the Buenos 

Aires avant-garde, he must have – erroneously but understandably – felt that 

acknowledging his creative dialogue with photographic developments in Europe would 

have compromised his personal contribution to the ‘new art’ within and beyond 

Argentina. 

Coppola’s pursuit of a novel visual vocabulary and his tense relationship with 

innovative European photographic practices bring to mind his fellow Martinfierrista, the 

painter and polymath Alejandro Xul Solar. As I discuss elsewhere, Xul’s participation in 

the Buenos Aires avant-garde in the 1920s is patent in his Pan-American project, and 

more specifically in his emphasis on the Bolivarian ideal of ‘our America […] the great 

Iberian America’, in his desire to develop ‘our own artistic revolution’, and in his 

invention, quite literally, of a new Latin American language: that is, the neocriollo, or 

Neo-Creole, a fusion of American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese with some words 

from English and German.127 ‘The rooms at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. An 

exhibition about German books’, recounts Coppola about his first meeting with Xul. ‘We 

introduced ourselves, and Xul Solar – already using his neocriollo words […] – shared 

secrets with me’.128 According to Schwartz, the neocriollo had ‘as its point of departure, 

the written adaptation of a gauchoized, colloquial language, definitive of what is 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 34 

supposedly an Argentine stock, with linguistic expressions that are typical of the Creolist 

vanguard of the period’.129 Xul’s Pan-American vision was eloquently visualised, among 

others, in the watercolours Mundo (World) (1925) and Drago (Dragon) (1927), where a 

flying serpent carrying the flags of Latin American countries dominates the scene.130 

Through the assimilation of Latin America’s different traditions and cultures, the Neo-

Creoles, he tells us, could pave the way for a new and better world.  

Xul’s discovery of the Der Blaue Reiter Almanach during his visit in Turin in 

1912 seems to have triggered a similar reaction to that of Coppola. The Argentine felt a 

strong connection with the expressionists’ take on utopia and spiritualism, especially with 

that of Kandinsky with whom he shared an interest in Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy 

and Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy, but he also felt the need to emphasise his own 

‘intuitive’ originality. In a letter, probably to a family member, in that same year, he 

spoke of the impact the discovery of the almanac had on him: ‘I am very satisfied 

because, on the one hand, I see how I, on my own, without any inspiration from outside, 

have worked according to the dominant tendency of the highest art of the future and, on 

the other, I see how I can stand out among these new artists easily because I have more 

sense of composition and colour than most of them’. 131  Worried about issues of 

originality and influence, Xul and Coppola mirror the aspirations and anxieties of a 

generation of American intellectuals and artists who strove for cultural and aesthetic 

independence from Europe. ‘We are and feel new’, wrote Xul around 1924, echoing 

Strand’s own vision of American photography. ‘Old and foreign paths do not lead to our 

new goal. [...] We have reached adulthood but we have not yet finished our wars for 

independence. The moral tutelage of Europe should end. [...] We do not have, in our brief 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 35 

past, artistic geniuses to guide (or tyrannise) us. To the weary world, we should bring a 

new meaning’. 132  If Xul, Strand, and Coppola, to borrow Brizuela’s words, were 

‘unencumbered by the weight of tradition’, this only applied endogenously, because they 

all ultimately shared what Eisinger has referred to as ‘the common American anxiety 

about artistic dependence on Europe’. The so-called ‘moral’, cultural, and aesthetic 

tutelage of Europe was what these artists, among many others from across the intellectual 

and cultural spectrum of the Americas, sought to abolish in those years. At the same time, 

in Argentina the urge to forge a culturally distinct identity was fuelled by the great influx 

of economic immigrants.  

Coppola’s partial acknowledgement of his photographic borrowings obviously 

failed to account for his visual experimentalism in the years from 1927 to 1931, as seen, 

for instance, in the use of unorthodox angles, tilting frames, and negatives, and of 

different lenses and prisms in abstract pictures like Prisma de cristal (Glass Prism), 

Interior de prisma (Interior of a Prism), and Autorretrato (Self-portrait) (figure 18), all 

three taken in 1928.133 It seems that from the barracks of the Buenos Aires avant-garde, 

Coppola was far more reluctant to confess a European affair than an American 

connection. His aesthetic genealogy nevertheless bears the marks of a long and fruitful 

dialogue with Neue Sachlichkeit and the New Vision that helped him articulate the first 

truly modern photographic language in Argentina and one of the most exciting visual 

idioms in twentieth-century Latin America. 

 

Captions 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 36 

Figure 1. Horacio Coppola, Medianera con aire-luz (Wall with Airshaft), gelatin silver 

print, 1931. © Estate of Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, 

Buenos Aires, 2016. 

 

Figure 2. Horacio Coppola, Calle Corrientes 3060 (3060 Corrientes Street), gelatin silver 

print, 1931. © Estate of Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, 

Buenos Aires, 2016.	
  

	
  

Figure 3. Horacio Coppola, Portón y grúa (Crane), gelatin silver print, 1931. © Estate of 

Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos Aires, 2016. 

 

Figure 4. Germaine Krull, Untitled (Métal), gelatin silver print, ca. 1925–1928. Amsab-

Institute of Social History (Amsab-ISH), Ghent. Reproduced by permission of Museum 

Folkwang, Fotografische Sammlung, Essen. 

 

Figure 5. Horacio Coppola, Puerto (Port), gelatin silver print, 1931. © Estate of Horacio 

Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos Aires, 2016.  

 

Figure 6. Horacio Coppola, Mateo y su victoria (Mateo and his Victoria), gelatin silver 

print, 1931. © Estate of Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, 

Buenos Aires, 2016. 

 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 37 

Figure 7. Horacio Coppola, Ángulo de escalera (Corner of Staircase), negative, gelatin 

silver print, 1929. © Estate of Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, 

Buenos Aires, 2016. 

 

Figure 8. Horacio Coppola, Mundo propio (One’s Own World), gelatin silver print, 1927. 

© Estate of Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos Aires, 

2016. 

 

Figure 9. Horacio Coppola, Materiales de construcción (Construction Materials), gelatin 

silver print, 1929. © Estate of Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, 

Buenos Aires, 2016. 

 

Figure 10. Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires, gelatin silver print, 1931. © Estate of Horacio 

Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos Aires, 2016 and Fundación 

Telefónica. 

 

Figure 11. Walter Ruttmann, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a 

Metropolis), film still (14m14s), 1927. Deutsche Kinemathek, Museum für Film und 

Fernsehen, Berlin. Reproduced by permission of Eva Riehl. 

 

Figure 12. Horacio Coppola, Sin título (Untitled), gelatin silver print, 1931. © Estate of 

Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos Aires, 2016. 

 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 38 

Figure 13. Alfredo Guttero, Elevadores de granos (Grain Elevators), oil on board, 58.7 

cm x 70 cm, 1928. Private Collection, Buenos Aires. 

 

Figure 14. Carl Grossberg, Brücke über die Schwarzbachstraße in Wuppertal (Bridge 

over Schwarzbach Street in Wuppertal), oil on board, 70 cm x 60 cm, 1927. 

Medienzentrum, Antje Zeis-Loi / Kunst- und Museumsverein, Wuppertal. 

 

Figure 15. Alfredo Guttero, Paisaje de Puerto Nuevo (Landscape of Puerto Nuevo), 

industrial pigment, plaster and natural gum on particleboard, 61 cm x 71 cm, 1928. 

Private Collection, Buenos Aires. 

 

Figure 16. Horacio Coppola, Esquina en las antiguas orillas. Calle Paraguay al 2600 

(Street Corner in the Old Limits of the City. 2600 Paraguay Street), gelatin silver print, 

1929. © Estate of Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos 

Aires, 2016.. 

 

Figure 17. Horacio Coppola, Calle Paraguay, esquina Jean Jaurés (Noroeste) (Corner of 

Paraguay Street and Jean Jaurés [Northeast]), gelatin silver print, 1936. © Estate of 

Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos Aires, 2016. 

 

Figure 18. Horacio Coppola, Autorretrato (Self-portrait), gelatin silver print, 1928. © 

Estate of Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos Aires, 2016. 

 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 39 

 

                                                
I wish to thank Luke Gartlan for his assistance with the review process and help 

preparing the text for publication, and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful 

comments and suggestions. I am grateful to the Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos 

Aires, and the Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, for providing images free of charge. For 

permission to reproduce the photographs in this article, the author and editor would like 

to express their gratitude to the family of Horacio Coppola, Eva Riehl and the Museum 

Folkwang, Fotografische Sammlung, Essen. This work was supported by the Arts and 

Humanities Research Council under Grant AH/J004790/1. Unless otherwise indicated, all 

translations from the Spanish are those of the author.  

 

Email for correspondence: ek30@st-andrews.ac.uk 

 

1 – Henry Miller, ‘Preface’, in Brassai [Gyula Halász], Conversations with Picasso, 

trans. Jane Marie Todd, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002, ix. 

2 – David Oubiña writes that before his first trip to Europe in December 1930, Coppola’s 

knowledge of photography was ‘basically intuitive’ and that ‘most probably’ he did not 

have ‘the chance to see many modern photos’ (‘antes de partir hacia Europa, entonces, 

sus conocimientos sobre fotografía son básicamente intuitivos y, muy probablemente, no 

ha tenido la ocasión de ver muchas fotos modernas’). David Oubiña, ‘La piel del mundo: 

Horacio Coppola y el cine’, in Luis Priamo, Natalia Brizuela, David Oubiña, and Patricia 

M. Artundo, Horacio Coppola: los viajes, Buenos Aires: Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 40 

                                                                                                                                            
2009, 193. See also, Andrea Cuarterolo, De la foto al fotograma: relaciones entre cine y 

fotografía en Argentina (1840–1933), Montevideo: CdF Ediciones 2013, 233. 

3 – Juan Manuel Bonet, ‘El siglo de Horacio Coppola’, in Horacio Coppola: Buenos 

Aires años treinta, ed. Juan Manuel Bonet, Buenos Aires: Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche 

2005, 5–12; and Jorge Schwartz, ‘Foundation of Buenos Aires: The Vision of Horacio 

Coppola’, in Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Jorge Schwartz, trans. Paul Edson and 

Araceli Montero, Madrid: Fundación Telefónica 2008, 338–43. 

4 – Founded by Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires in 1931, Sur was responsible for the 

dissemination of European and world culture into Latin America for more than forty 

years. Francine Masiello refers to Sur as ‘Latin America’s cultural journal of greatest 

longevity and widest international reputation’. Francine Masiello, Between Civilization & 

Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina, Lincoln: 

University of Nebraska Press 1992, 146–47. Brizuela points out that the Argentine mass 

media ‘barely’ experimented with photography in the 1920s and 1930s. ‘Only in Sur’, 

she says, ‘the magazine which envisioned itself as part of a global network of high 

modernist aesthetics and as the translator of this “global modernism” into Spanish, did 

photography not only appear, but also have a central place during its first decade’. Natalia 

Brizuela, ‘Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola and the Question of Modern Photography in 

Argentina’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 24:2 (June 2015), 245–46. 

Coppola’s seven photographs were published in Sur, 4 (September–December 1931), 

while the following issue (December 1931–February 1932) included five more pictures 

by him. The twelve photographs are reproduced in Luis Priamo, ‘El joven Coppola’, in 

Priamo, Brizuela, Oubiña, and Artundo, Horacio Coppola: los viajes, 17. Regarding the 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 41 

                                                                                                                                            
modern visuality of Siete temas, Verónica Tell observes that ‘Coppola ventured beyond 

the places most commonly replicated in different publications that tended to repeat the 

traditional iconography of Buenos Aires, or would represent familiar places in a different 

way. […] His use of reflections, projected shadows, unorthodox framing and high-angle 

shots clearly form part of modern photographic language’. Verónica Tell, ‘Portraits of 

Places: Notes on Horacio Coppola’s Photography and Short Urban Films’, Journal of 

Latin American Cultural Studies, 24:2 (June 2015), 155. 

5 – Natalia Brizuela, ‘Horacio Coppola y el extrañamiento de lo real’, in Priamo, 

Brizuela, Oubiña, and Artundo, Horacio Coppola: los viajes, 187–88; and Brizuela 

‘Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola’, 252. Schwartz confirms that Ocampo returned to 

Argentina with two photographs by Stieglitz, probably from his Equivalents, ‘a series of 

cloud photographs taken obsessively between 1922 and 1930, some of which – 

verticalised – appear to take on a wholly independent identity, as abstractions cut loose 

from their moorings’. Schwartz, ‘Foundation’, 340 and 342. 

6 – For a selection of photographs, see Priamo, ‘El joven Coppola’, 13–14. 

7 – Paul Strand, ‘Photography’ (1917), in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan 

Trachtenberg, New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Book 1980, 141–42. 

8 – See Maria Morris Hambourg, Paul Strand Circa 1916, New York: Metropolitan 

Museum of Art 1998, plates 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 31 and 33.  

9 – Ibid., 32–34. 

10 – Schwartz, who calls Moholy-Nagy’s book ‘the quintessential expression of 

experimentalism’, argues that it ‘contains theoretical texts on the new art which were to 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 42 

                                                                                                                                            
inspire the young Coppola’, but without providing more evidence as to when Coppola 

came across Moholy-Nagy’s work. Schwartz, ‘Foundation’, 341. 

11 – See Andreas Haus, Moholy Nagy: Photographs and Photograms, trans. Frederic 

Samson, New York: Pantheon Books 1980, plates 16 and 24. 

12 – Dziga Vertov, ‘Kinocks: A Revolution’, in Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 

ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien, Berkeley: University of California Press 

1984, 17–18. Rodchenko’s text was originally published as ‘Kinoki: Perevoròt’ in LEF, 3 

(June/July 1923), 135–43. A year earlier, he had worked on the titles of Vertov’s 

pioneering newsreel series Kino-Pravda (Film-Truth). See Victor Margolin, The Struggle 

for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917–1946, Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press 1997, 126. 

13 – Margolin, Struggle for Utopia, 133. For Rodchenko’s pictures, see Margolin, 

Struggle for Utopia, figures 134 and 135. For Coppola’s photographs, see Horacio 

Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 196; and Horacio Coppola: Buenos Aires años 

treinta, ed. Bonet, 41. 

14 – Brizuela, ‘Horacio Coppola’, 187: ‘La sincronía entre las fotos de Stieglitz y las de 

Coppola es más tenue que la familiaridad de este último con Strand, de quien 

probablemente Coppola no haya visto ni leído nada para 1931’. 

15 – See Horacio Coppola, ‘Autobiographical Text’, in Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. 

Schwartz, 372–73. 

16 – Brizuela, ‘Horacio Coppola’, 187: ‘En sintonía, sin lugar a dudas, con las fotografías 

de la Nueva Visión’ and ‘Los “Siete temas. Buenos Aires” […] contienen todos los 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 43 

                                                                                                                                            
elementos formales de la Nueva Visión europea que Coppola aún no conoce y que no ha 

aprendido en el taller de la Bauhaus’. 

17 – Ibid., 187–88. 

18 – Fritz Hensler informed Coppola that the Department of Photography at Marburg had 

closed and told him about the new Bauhaus in Berlin, which he eventually joined. 

Patricia M. Artundo, ‘Chronology’, in Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 361.  

19 – See Luis Priamo, ‘El joven Coppola’, 17. With respect to Moholy-Nagy’s Boat, 

Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold included the negative in Foto-Auge/Oeil et Photo/Photo-

Eye, ed. Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold, Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz 

Wedekind & Co. 1929, 69. A year later, Roh published both positive and negative in 

Franz Roh, L. Moholy Nagy: 60 Fotos, Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann 1930, 11–12. For 

Rodchenko’s and Kertész’s photographs, see, respectively, Margarita Tupitsyn, 

Alexander Rodtschenko. Das Neue Moskau: Fotografien aus der Sammlung L. und G. 

Tatunz, Munich: Schirmer/Mosel 1998, plate 29; and André Kertész: His Life and Work, 

ed. Pierre Borhan, Boston: Bullfinch Press 1994, 181. Finally, for Moholy-Nagy’s 

Gangplank from Above, see Haus, Moholy Nagy, plate 52. 

20 – See, respectively, Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 184; Alexander 

Lavrentiev, Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography, Moscow: Multimedia 

Complex of Actual Arts 2008, 86; Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 215, 217 

and 222; and Albert Renger-Patzsch: Photographer of Objectivity, ed. Ann and Jürgen 

Wilde and Thomas Weski, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1998, plates 38–55 and 68.  

21 – See Ann and Jürgen Wilde and Weski, Albert Renger-Patzsch, plate 29.  

22 – See Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, London: Reaktion 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 44 

                                                                                                                                            
Books 1991, plates 42 and 45. Sergiusz Michalski calls Sheeler ‘the American Neue 

Sachlichkeit painter’. Sergiusz Michalski, New Objectivity: Painting, Graphic Art and 

Photography in Weimar Germany 1919–1933, trans. Michael Claridge,	
   Cologne: 

Benedikt Taschen 1994, 192. 

23 – Schwartz, ‘Foundation’, 342. 

24 – See Photography at the Bauhaus, ed. Jeannine Fiedler, London: Dirk Nishen 

Publishing 1990, 39. 

25 – For more examples of thematic and formal affinities between Coppola’s early work 

and that of contemporary European and North American photographers, see appendix 

with photographs in Priamo, Brizuela, Oubiña, and Artundo, Horacio Coppola: los 

viajes, 21–47. 

26 – Priamo, ‘El joven Coppola’, 16: ‘este salto gigante’. 

27 – Coppola, ‘Autobiographical Text’, 372–73. 

28 – Oubiña, ‘La piel’, 193: ‘Significativamente la colección de Coppola no abunda en 

libros sobre fotografía de esa época’. Among the publications Oubiña mentions are books 

by Jean Epstein, Paul Rotha, Rudolf Arnheim, Henri Diamant-Berger, Béla Balázs, 

Raymond Spottiswoode, and Léon Moussinac, as well as several issues of Cinema 

Quarterly, Film Art, L’Art cinématographique and Close Up. 

29 – Horacio Coppola, ‘Interview’, in Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 377. 

30 – Priamo, ‘El joven Coppola’, 16: ‘Horacio siempre desestimó la influencia de 

Peterhans sobre su fotografía en su paso por la Bauhaus’. 

31 – See Brizuela, ‘Horacio Coppola’, 182. 

32 – Coppola, ‘Autobiographical Text’, 373. 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 45 

                                                                                                                                            
33 – Armando Coppola was a member of the Sociedad Fotográfica Argentina de 

Aficionados (Argentine Photographic Society of Amateurs), the only photographic 

society of the time, founded in 1889 by individuals ‘of the land-owning classes and social 

celebrities’. Armando’s still lifes covered a range of subjects, including ‘texture studies 

with leaves and stones, compositions with vases of flowers, lamps, dolls and mannequins, 

tools, dental braces placed on a plaster head to produce a comic effect which hovers 

between the surreal and the grotesque’. Luis Priamo, ‘Before Coppola’, in Horacio 

Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 346–48. 

34 – Roh’s book is a good candidate to have attracted Coppola’s attention considering 

that the photographer strongly admired his work (see Priamo, ‘El joven Coppola’, 11). 

Roh’s 1925 essay ‘Nachexpressionismus. Magischer Realismus’ (Post-Expressionism: 

Magic Realism) was translated into Spanish two years later and published in the Revista 

de Occidente to which Coppola had subscribed in 1925 (Artundo, ‘Chronology’, 360). By 

1928, his term ‘magical realism’, which was soon to be replaced by Gustav Hartlaub’s 

‘new objectivity’, ‘was being applied to the prose of European authors in the literary 

circles of Buenos Aires’, which Coppola frequented. See Irene Guenther, ‘Magic 

Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic’, in Magical 

Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 

Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005, 61. 

35 – Graeff’s book was another informal companion to the Film und Foto exhibition. 

36 – Schwartz, ‘Foundation’, 341 (emphasis added). The Spanish version of the article 

makes the same point: ‘estas fotos y textos teóricos serían decisivos en el desarrollo de la 

mirada de Coppola’ (these photographs and theoretical texts would be decisive in the 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 46 

                                                                                                                                            
development of Coppola’s approach). Jorge Schwartz, ‘Fundación de Buenos Aires: la 

mirada de Coppola’, in Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 29. For the positive, 

see Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 237. 

37 – Schwartz, ‘Foundation’, 341. Some representative examples of negatives by 

Andreas Feininger, Roh, and Moholy-Nagy were included in Foto-Auge, ed. Roh and 

Tschichold, 4, 64, 65, and 69. 

38 – For Coppola’s pictures, see Priamo, ‘El joven Coppola’, 5–6. For Lenk’s painting 

and Renger-Patzsch’s photographs, see New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the 

Weimar Republic, 1919–1933, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, Los Angeles: 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art 2015, 154 and 155. 

39 – For San Gimignano, see Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 232. Priamo 

informs us that the tilted City Hall balcony of San Gimignano, taken with his brother 

‘Armando’s little 4 x 4 camera’ (Coppola, ‘Autobiographical Text’, 372), is the only 

surviving photograph of Coppola’s first visit to Europe (Priamo, ‘El joven Coppola’, 11).  

40 – For Barricas, Ramos Mejía, see Horacio Coppola: de la Bauhaus a Buenos Aires, 

ed. Sergio Baur, Madrid: Galería Guillermo de Osma 2004, 8. 

41 – Bonet, ‘El siglo de Horacio Coppola’, 5: ‘ya antes del final de los años veinte, 

Horacio Coppola había asimilado a distancia, fragmentariamente, el idioma de la 

modernidad europea, de la Neue Sachlichkeit o Nueva Objetividad, de una Nueva 

Visión’. 

42 – For Priamo’s reference to pictorialist Argentina, see ‘El joven Coppola’, 10. 

Brizuela points out that ‘in 1930, a very successful First International Salon of 

Photography had been held in Argentina, which privileged a showcase of pictorialist-type 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 47 

                                                                                                                                            
photographs in the Argentine selection (56 of 358 photographs shown were Argentine, 

from a couple of dozen photographers). The avant-garde practices already widely 

prevalent in the medium throughout the Americas and Europe – from Paul Strand, Man 

Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Umbo to Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Tina Modotti – were 

markedly absent from this first Salon’ (Brizuela, ‘Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola’, 253). 

As I will argue later, Coppola operated within the context of the Buenos Aires avant-

garde, known as the Martín Fierro group, and the Amigos del Arte (both established in 

1924), as well as that of the Cine Club (founded in 1929).  

43 – Oubiña, ‘La piel’, 193. 

44 – Coppola co-founded the Cine Club with León Klimovsky. The Club counted among 

its members Alfredo Guttero, Jorge Romero Brest, Jorge Luis Borges, Néstor Ibarra, and 

Guillermo de Torre. Artundo, ‘Chronology’, 360–61. 

45 – Jorge Miguel Couselo, ‘Los orígenes de cineclubismo en la Argentina y “La Gaceta 

Literaria”’, Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes 2000, n.p., available at 

http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmcf76b3 (accessed 26 April 2016). The 

Amigos del Arte, ‘a group of young intellectuals and artists who were trying to develop 

Buenos Aires into an important center of culture’ attracted the attention of major 

European and American intellectuals and artists of the time, including Marinetti, Le 

Corbusier, Waldo Frank, and García Lorca. Alejandro Lapunzina, Le Corbusier’s Maison 

Curutchet, New York: Princeton Architectural Press 1997, 20–21. 

46 – See Cuarterolo, De la foto, 236; and Couselo, ‘Los orígenes’, n.p. 

47 – Guillermo de Torre, ‘“El Cineclub” de Buenos Aires’, La Gaceta Literaria, 79 

(1930), 5: ‘La novedad más considerable que puede presentar el Cineclub de Buenos 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 48 

                                                                                                                                            
Aires con relación a todos los clubs similares europeos es la abundancia de “films” rusos 

soviéticos, de aquellos que la censura europea proscribe y que aquí se dan públicamente y 

sin mayor asombro’. 

48 – For Coppola’s documentary short, see Oubiña, ‘La piel’, 207–08; and Tell, ‘Portraits 

of Places’, 162–65. 

49 – Richard Whelan, Double Take: A Comparative Look at Photographs, New York: C. 

N. Potter 1981, 120. 

50 – Nora M. Alter, ‘Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927): City, Image, Sound’, in 

Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. Noah William 

Isenberg, New York: Columbia University Press 2009, 198–99. 

51 – Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich, and Sharon Monteith, ‘Realism, Nationalism and 

“Film Culture”’, in Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader, ed. Paul Grainge, Mark 

Jancovich, and Sharon Monteith, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2007, 167; and 

Alter, ‘Berlin’, 211. 

52 – Christopher Phillips, ‘Resurrecting Vision: The New Photography in Europe 

Between the Wars’, in The New Vision: Photography Between the Two Worlds, ed. Maria 

Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art 

1994, 94.  

53 – See Albert Renger-Patzsch, ed. Ann and Jürgen Wilde and Weski, plates 24, 35, and 

43. 

54 – See ibid., plate 56. 

55 – Maria Makela, ‘“A Clear and Simple Style”: Tradition and Typology in New 

Objectivity’, Museum Studies (Art Institute of Chicago), 28:1 (Spring 2002), 39; and 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 49 

                                                                                                                                            
Guenther, ‘Magic Realism’, 45–46. 

56 – De Torre, ‘La nueva pintura argentina’, La Gaceta Literaria, 95 (December 1930), 

8: ‘Alfredo Guttero, quizá el decano de esta muchachada’. Eduardo F. Costantini, 

‘Presentation’, trans. Nicole O’Dwyer, in Guttero: un artista moderno en acción, ed. 

Marcelo E. Pacheco, Buenos Aires: Malba 2006, 171. 

57 – Adrián Gorelik, ‘Horacio Coppola, 1929: Borges, Le Corbusier and the “Casitas” of 

Buenos Aires’, in Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 349; and María Teresa 

Constantin, ‘Alfredo Guttero and the Industrial Landscape’, trans. Wendy Gosselin, in 

Guttero: un artista moderno en acción, ed. Pacheco, 201–02. 

58 – Patricia M. Artundo, ‘Alfredo Guttero in Buenos Aires 1927–1932’, trans. Jane 

Brodie, in Guttero: un artista moderno en acción, ed. Pacheco, 178; and Guenther, 

‘Magic Realism’, 4. Guenther notes that notwithstanding their pronounced differences, 

Russian Constructivism, Fernard Léger’s ‘réalisme nouveau’, Jean Cocteau’s ‘rappel à 

l’ordre’, and American straight photography, all belonged to the same context. Guenther, 

‘Magic Realism’, 45. 

59 – Likewise, in the work of Guttero, Constantin says, ‘the industry is the central motif, 

but the human presence in the foreground [figure 15] cannot be ignored in spite of its 

size’. Constantin, ‘Alfredo Guttero’, 202. 

60 – Artundo, ‘Alfredo Guttero’, 178. 

61 – Alfredo Guttero, Guttero-Falcini: epistolario, 1916–1930. Cartas a un amigo, ed. 

Patricia M. Artundo, Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofía y 

Letras, Instituto de Teoría e Historia del Arte ‘Julio E. Payró’ 2000, 57, cited in Artundo, 

‘Alfredo Guttero’, 178. 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 50 

                                                                                                                                            
62 – For Guttero’s paintings, see Costa Malosetti, Pampa, ciudad y suburbia, Buenos 

Aires: Fundación OSDE 2007, 52; ‘Alfredo Guttero: Silo’, Museo Nacional de Bellas 

Artes, Argentina, available at http://mnba.gob.ar/coleccion/obra/7718 (accessed 27 April 

2016); Constantin, ‘Alfredo Guttero y el paisaje industrial’, in Guttero: un artista 

moderno en acción, ed. Pacheco, 59; and Guttero: un artista moderno en acción, ed. 

Pacheco, 88. 

63 – Schwartz, ‘Foundation’, 338. 

64 – Artundo, ‘Chronology’, 361; and Patricia M. Artundo, ‘Biographical Chronology of 

Alfredo Guttero (1882–1932)’, trans. Patricia Haynes, in Guttero: un artista moderno en 

acción, ed. Pacheco, 209. A year later an exhibition on the ‘Novecento Italiano’ was 

organised at the Amigos del Arte. 

65 – Coppola, ‘Autobiographical Text’, 372. 

66 – Ibid. Guttero had co-founded the Asociación de Artistas Argentinos en Europa 

(Association of Argentine Artists in Europe). See Marcelo E. Pacheco, ‘Curatorial 

Practice and Fields of Writing: The Case of Alfredo Guttero’, trans. Gosselin, in Guttero: 

un artista moderno en acción, ed. Pacheco, 174. 

67 – Gorelik, ‘Horacio Coppola’, 351. 

68 – With the exception of the sixth lecture, which took place at the Amigos de la Ciudad 

on 14 October 1929.  

69 – Coppola, ‘Autobiographical Text’, 373.  

70 – Coppola, ‘Interview’, 377. 

71 – Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, 

trans. Edith Schreiber Aujame, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1991, 200 and 210. 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 51 

                                                                                                                                            
72 – Although we do not know whether the 1929 picture, which was originally published 

in Borges’s book Evaristo Carriego (Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer Editor 1930), was taken 

before or after Le Corbusier’s lectures (Gorelik, ‘Horacio Coppola’, 351), the influence 

that the latter exerted on Coppola, as the photographer himself acknowledged, is evident 

in many of his post-1929 photographs. 

73 – Gorelik, ‘Horacio Coppola’, 351. 

74 – Ibid.  

75 – Le Corbusier, Precisions, 228–29. 

76 – Werner Hegemann, ‘El espíritu de Schinkel en Sud América’, trans. I. Stok, Revista 

de Arquitectura, 142 (October 1932), 468: ‘Las empresas constructoras levantan todavía 

hoy miles de pequeñas casas que están completamente dentro de las formas clásicas [que] 

se han simplificado y depurado de los agregados barrocos y se han entregado de lleno, 

inmediata e inocentemente, a un materialismo [Sachlichkeit] modernísimo. […] No fue 

necesario en la América del Sud la importación del cubismo de la posguerra por 

arquitectos europeos, pues se formó solo, como consecuencia natural y lógica de su sana 

tradición’. Originally published as ‘Schinkelscher Geist in Südamerika’, Städtebau, 27:7 

(July 1932), 333-41. Cited in Gorelik, ‘Avant-Garde and Classicism: Horacio Coppola’s 

and Facundo de Zuviría’s Buenos Aires’, in Buenos Aires: Coppola + Zuviría, ed. Adrián 

Gorelik, trans. Paola del Campo, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Larivière 2006, 208. See also, 

Jorge Francisco Liernur and Pablo Pschepiurca, La red austral: obras y proyectos de Le 

Corbusier y sus discípulos en la Argentina (1924–1965), Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros 

2008, 159. 

77 – Coppola, ‘Autobiographical Text’, 372. 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 52 

                                                                                                                                            
78 – Coppola, ‘Interview’, 377. 

79 – ‘Una especie de biblia’. Cited in Juan Manuel Bonet, Diccionario de las 

vanguardias en España, 1907–1936, Madrid: Alianza 1995, 595; and cited in Trinidad 

Barrera, ‘Historiografía y canon de las vanguardias’, in Alma América: in Honorem 

Victorino Polo, ed. Vicente Cervera Salinas and María Dolores Adsuar Fernández, vol. 1, 

Murcia: Universidad de Murcia 2008, 111. 

80 – Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Memorias de un dictador, Barcelona: Planeta 1979, 60: 

‘[…] por su erudición prodigiosa sobre todos los ismos’. 

81 – Three years later, Coppola attended Ortega y Gasset’s course in philosophy at the 

Arts Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires. Artundo, ‘Chronology’, 360. 

82 – Gonzalo Aguilar, ‘A Passion for Geometry’, in Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. 

Schwartz, 354. 

83 – José Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme, trans. James Cleugh, New York: Harper 

& Row 1961, 90. 

84 – Artundo, ‘Chronology’, 360. 

85 – Ibid. 

86 – Coppola, ‘Interview’, 377. For Coppola’s and Stern’s different photographic 

modernisms, see Brizuela, ‘Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola’, 247–56. 

87 – Phillips, ‘Resurrecting Vision’, 94. 

88 – Coppola, ‘Exhibition of Photographs by Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern’, in 

Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 367 (emphasis added). 

89 – Strand, ‘Photography’, 142. 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 53 

                                                                                                                                            
90 – ‘From the year 1913 onwards, I have been expounding, in my university lecture, this 

doctrine of “perspectivity”, which is briefly and arbitrarily formulated in El Espectador, I 

(1916)’. Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme, 92. 

91 – Ibid., 90 and 92. 

92 – Joel Eisinger, Trace and Transformation: American Criticism of Photography in the 

Modernist Period, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1995, 56 and 65. 

93 – Franz Roh, ‘Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism’, trans. Wendy B. Faris, in 

Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy 

B. Faris, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005, 24. 

94 – Alexander Rodchenko, ‘The Paths of Modern Photography’, in Photography in the 

Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher 

Phillips, trans. John E. Bowlt, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art / Aperture 1989, 

262. Originally published as ‘Puti sovremennoi fotografii’, Novyi LEF, 9 (September 

1928), 31–39. 

95 – Moholy-Nagy, ‘Photography’ (1925), in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. 

Trachtenberg, 166 (italics in original). 

96 – Campo Grafico: Rivista di Estetica e di Tecnica Grafica, 3 (March 1937). This was 

a special issue on the work of Coppola and Stern.  

97 – Horacio Coppola, ‘On Photography’, in Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 

trans. Edson and Montero, 368. 

98 – Albert Renger-Patzsch, ‘Goals’, in Albert Renger-Patzsch, ed. Ann and Jürgen 

Wilde and Weski, 165. 

99 – Coppola, ‘On Photography’, 368. 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 54 

                                                                                                                                            
100 – Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme, 90 and 95. 

101 – Coppola, ‘On Photography’, 368. 

102 – Horacio Coppola, ‘Definition of Imagema’, in Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. 

Schwartz, 377 (original emphasis). 

103 – Coppola, ‘On Photography’, 368–69. 

104 – Part of the inscription on the façade of the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, composed by 

Paul Valéry: ‘regarder / comme jamais encore vues / toutes choses qui sont au monde’. 

Cited in Horacio Coppola, ‘Imagema’, in Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 

trans. Edson and Montero, 369. 

105 – Coppola, ‘Imagema’, 369 (original emphasis). 

106 – Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard 

Howard, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1981, 26–27 and 43–45. 

107 – Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’ (1960), in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. 

Trachtenberg, 259. 

108 – Renger-Patzsch, ‘Goals’, 166. 

109 – Roh, ‘Magic Realism’, 27. 

110 – Grethe Jürgens, ‘Rezepte zum ersprießlichen Besuch einer Kunstausstellung’, Der 

Wachsbogen, 5/6 (January 1932), 8–10, cited and translated in Guenther, ‘Magic 

Realism’, 36. 

111 – Coppola, ‘Imagema’, 369 (original emphasis). 

112 – Thomas Mann, Reden und Aufsätze, vol. 2, Frankfurt: S. Fischer 1965, 776, cited in 

Michalski, New Objectivity, 189. 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 55 

                                                                                                                                            
113 – Edward Weston, ‘Seeing Photographically’ (1965), in Classic Essays on 

Photography, ed. Trachtenberg, 169–75. 

114 – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans Bernard Wall, New 

York: Harper & Row 1959, 31, cited in Coppola, ‘Autobiographical Text’, 370 (original 

emphasis). 

115 – Weston’s turn to straight photography was heralded by his 1922 pictures of the 

ARMCO Steel Plant in Middletown, Ohio (see R. H. Cravens, Edward Weston, New 

York: Aperture 1988, 7), which ‘were a stunning departure from his previous work: 

sharp-focused, powerful visions of the Armco Steel mills’ (Cravens, Edward Weston, 

10).  

116 – Eisinger, Trace and Transformation, 58. 

117 – James R. Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910, New York: Oxford 

University Press 1974, 51. 

118 – José Ramón Navarro Vera, ‘El Buenos Aires de Borges: paisaje interior versus 

paisaje construido’, in Escrituras de la ciudad, ed. José Carlos Rovira, Madrid: Palas 

Atenea 1999, 132. 

119 – David Rock, ‘Argentina 1930–1946’, in Argentina Since Independence, ed. Leslie 

Bethell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993, 173. 

120 – Artundo, ‘Chronology’, 360. 

121 – Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press 1996, 

17. These antinomies were first formulated by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in his 

famous essay Facundo: civilización y barbarie (Facundo: Between Civilisation and 

Barbarism) (1845). Sarmiento, who would later serve as President of Argentina, read the 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 56 

                                                                                                                                            
tension between the ‘American’ and the ‘European’, the ‘rural’ (Pampa) and the ‘urban’ 

(Buenos Aires), as a struggle between ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilisation’, and spoke of the 

inherent duality of Argentine identity. 

122 – Ricardo Güiraldes, Don Segundo Sombra, Buenos Aires: Editorial Proa 1926. Born 

into a family of wealthy landowners, Güiraldes himself had spent his childhood between 

Europe and the Pampa.  

123 – Coppola, ‘Autobiographical Text’, 372. 

124 – Ibid. 

125 – Brizuela, ‘Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola’, 250. 

126 – Ibid. 

127 – Alejandro Xul Solar, ‘Pettoruti’, in Alejandro Xul Solar: entrevistas, artículos y 

textos inéditos, ed. Patricia M. Artundo, Buenos Aires: Corregidor 2006a, 98–99 (original 

emphasis): ‘nuestra América […], la gran AMERICA IBERICA’. Solar, ‘Pettoruti’, in 

Alejandro Xul Solar: entrevistas, artículos y textos inéditos, ed. Artundo, 2006b, 110: 

‘nuestra revolución artística propia’. In the Spanish-American context, the term criollo 

(Creole) indicates people of European descent who were born and bred in America.  

128 – Coppola, ‘Autobiographical Text’, 372. 

129 – Schwartz, ‘Let the Stars Compose Syllables: Xul and Neo-Creole’, in Xul Solar: 

visiones y revelaciones, ed. Patricia M. Artundo, Buenos Aires: Pinacoteca 2005, 200. 

130 – Eleni Kefala, ‘“La gran América Ibérica”: humanismo y utopía en los años veinte. 

El caso de Xul Solar’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 36:3 (Spring 2012), 

466–67. 



History of Photography 40:4 (November 2016) 57 

                                                                                                                                            
131 – Unpublished letter received in Buenos Aires on 8 November 1921. Archive of the 

Fundación Pan Klub-Museo Xul Solar, cited in Jorge López Anaya, ‘Xul Solar: una 

utopía espiritualista’, in Xul Solar: una utopía espiritualista, ed. Jorge López Anaya, 

Buenos Aires: Fundación Pan Klub, Museo Xul Solar 2002, 15: ‘Estoy muy satisfecho 

porque veo cómo yo solo, sin ninguna inspiración de afuera, he trabajado en la tendencia 

dominante del arte más elevado del porvenir por una parte y por la otra veo cómo podré 

sobresalir entre estos artistas nuevos fácilmente porque tengo más sentido de la 

composición y color que la mayoría de ellos’ (originally written in Italian and translated 

into Spanish by López Anaya). For more on Xul’s spiritual utopianism in the 1930s, see 

Eleni Kefala, ‘Xul Solar, the Reluctant Utopian’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 89:2 

(February 2012), 253–79. 

132 – Solar, ‘Pettoruti’, 2006b, 99: ‘Somos y nos sentimos nuevos, a nuestra meta nueva 

no conducen caminos viejos y ajenos. […] Somos mayores de edad y aún no hemos 

terminado las guerras pro independencia. Acabe ya la tutela moral de Europa. […] No 

tenemos en nuestro corto pasado genios artísticos que nos guíen (ni tiranicen). Al mundo 

cansado, aportar un sentido nuevo’. 

133 – See Horacio Coppola: fotografía, ed. Schwartz, 229 and 231. The three pictures 

were taken with a view camera 18 cm x 24 cm (Priamo, ‘El joven Coppola’, 8).