Horacio Coppola
 Nocturno, 1936
(Nocturne)Vintage gelatin silver print on paper, 17.7 x 20.7 cm

In the aesthetic formation and practice of Horacio Coppola (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1906–2012), as applied to the construction of a modern way of seeing the city and the landscape that defines it, there are at least four basic elements: the initiation in photography provided by his brother Armando; his personal relationship with Jorge Luis Borges, which resulted in a visual accord between his photographs and Borges’s literary work, in particular with regard to his perception of Buenos Aires, a city that they imagined as being empty instead of being occupied by multitudes; his participation in the founding of the first film club in the Argentine capital in 1929; and his attendance at the talks that Le Corbusier gave there that year. As Coppola himself acknowledged, the Swiss architect’s ideas and the principles of city planning that he advocated proved decisive for Coppola’s way of seeing (and later photographing) Buenos Aires: “he [Le Corbusier] analysed the dense pattern of the city’s blocks and building sites, a system in which all the buildings have a single façade and two exposed sides …”. A further factor was the part played by the overtly modern magazines devoted to modern international art, architecture and culture: Martín Fierro (1924–1927) and Sur (founded in 1931), in which his first photographs of Buenos Aires appeared in the issues published in the spring of that year.
Coppola had defined his way of seeing, his method and his photographic language before he travelled to Europe, where he was in December 1930. He planned his second visit better: between October 1932 and April 1933 he attended a photography course given by Walter Peterhans at the Bauhaus in Berlin. In addition to meeting Grete Stern, whom he married in 1935, he got to know various artists, photographers and graphic designers who were experimenting with photographic languages and materials. After his return to Argentina with the beginnings of a career and recognition, in 1936 the municipality of Buenos Aires commissioned him to produce a book to celebrate the fourth centenary of the founding of the city. The result was a graphic narrative consisting of over two hundred photographs and bearing the title Buenos Aires. Visión de Horacio Coppola, which included Nocturno. Architecture and night scenes were the dominant thematic corpus of the book, in which he offered his “photographic view” of the city, from the river to the Pampa. This book, which originated as a commission, immediately joined the series of specific books of photographs of cities that were published in those years. Brassaï’s Paris la nuit (1933), Andreas Feininger’s Stockholm (1936) and Bill Brandt’s A Night in London (1938) were some of the most outstanding examples. Coppola’s book has various features in common with them, such as the dynamic conception of the city and the life that takes place in it, from dawn to dusk, in which work and leisure and means of transport feature prominently.In Nocturno there is a concentration of the characteristics of that photo book, and it exemplifies the way in which his photographs combine, on the one hand, an analysis of the city based on architectural features, creating a composition with the structural elements of the buildings and the serial patterns (and contrasts of light) of the openings of the windows in the façades or exploiting the receding perspectives formed by avenues and cornices, and, on the other, a view of the city that he developed as a photographer, based on the perspective offered by the camera. If we analyse Nocturno in terms of composition we see that the slightly low camera angle enables him to offer a more unusual image of the city, although it is also the viewpoint of someone who is immersed in the city’s tempos and speeds. Coppola offers a broad, seemingly empty foreground, crossed by a strong diagonal – the street – which divides the composition into two parts. The layers or features of the composition accumulate in the upper part: the line of parked cars, the façade of a hotel with its pilasters and cornices and flags hanging down.
Light plays a central part in this night scene: it intensifies the volume of the objects that are included (through contrast). The gleam of the metal surface of the perfectly aligned cars, the repetition of the image and the sheer quantity of them present a condensation of the values of modernity: of the city that was being displayed in the book and of Coppola’s way of seeing, in which we find characteristics that he shared with the photographers of what had become known as Neues Sehen (New Vision). Other features that they had in common were a monumentalisation of detail, in this case the street, a delight in the physical qualities of the objects photographed and their plastic possibilities, and the absence of people in the photographs. Coppola seems to say that the city speaks about itself in the way in which it is laid out. The bar sign suggests a view from outside that does not eliminate what is going on inside the city but relegates it to a position of less importance.
Bibliografía
Horacio Fernández: El fotolibro latinoamericano. Editorial RM,Barcelona, 2011.
Horacio Coppola. Fotografía. Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, 2008.
El Buenos Aires de Horacio Coppola. IVAM Institut Valencià d’Arte Modern, Valencia, 1996