Horacio Coppola was born in 1906 in the city of Buenos Aires, where he currently lives. In 1932 he studied in Berlin at the Bauhaus’s Photography Department, directed by Walter Peterhans, with whom he took contact through Grete Stern, the German photographer with whom he married three years later.
Since his return to Buenos Aires in 1935 he has dedicated only to photography. His work is really vast. The most outstanding series among them are the one about precolombian art, another about the Brazilian sculptor Aleijandinho and another one about different places of Europe. His pieces about the city of Buenos Aires, made since the early thirties, are an unavoidable reference in the traditional photography field whose subject is this city.
His work can be appreciated in the following books: Buenos Aires 1936. Visión Fotográfica (Municipality of Buenos Aires´s edition, 1936), Esculturas de Antônio Francisco Lisboa, o Aleijadinho (1955), Cuarenta años de fotografía (1969), Imagema. Antología fotográfica 1927-1994 (1994), El Buenos Aires de Horacio Coppola (IVAM, Valencia, 1996) and Buenos Aires años 30 (Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche, 2005), among others.
His exhibitions took place in a great number of museums. The Museo de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires (MNBA), the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA), the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM, Valencia) and the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) are some of them. Besides, one of his works integrates the Museum of Modern Art of New York’s (MoMA) collection. In 2008, the Instituto Moreira Salles of Rio de Janeiro organized Horacio Coppola. Visões de Buenos Aires, an important exhibition that travelled across many cities of Brazil. During that same year, in March, the Fundación Telefónica opened a huge itinerant retrospective in Madrid that included the edition of the book Horacio Coppola. Fotografía
In 2009, Jorge Mara-La Ruche opened the exhibition named Horacio Coppola. Los viajes, a series of unpublished pictures taken between 1931 and 1935 during a trip around Brazil, Germany, England and France. Then, the exhibition was moved to the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. Due to this event, an extensive catalogue was published. It included reproductions of his works with texts written by Luis Priamo, Natalia Brizuela and David Oubiña and also a DVD that contained four movies made by Coppola during those years (Un quai de la Seine, Traum, A Sunday in Hampstead Heath and Así nació el Obelisco).
Coppola received two important prizes between 1982 and 1985: the Premio Konex de Platino in 1982 and the Gran Premio de Honor in 1985. When he turned a hundred years old in 2006, the municipality of Buenos Aires put big reproductions of his most famous pictures in the places where they had been taken between 1931 and 1936 (creating a sort of trip across the city) as a tribute.
