Horacio Coppola

Horacio Coppola (1906 – 2012) was an Argentine photographer and filmmaker, and the husband of the German photographer Grete Stern.

Coppola was born in Buenos Aires, the youngest of 10 children. His parents, Italian immigrants, were well off, and he studied art, music, law and languages. He was about 20 when he began taking pictures.

He traveled to Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. Photography was coming into its own as an art form, with pictures being shot from odd angles and cropped for effect.

In  London, he took portraits of famous artists, and worked on a book about Mesopotamian artefacts in the Louvre and the British Museum. He went back to Argentina in 1936. That year, he was commissioned to photograph Buenos Aires for its 400th anniversary, and produced streetscapes that captured the romance, vitality and squalor of a great city.

He was one of the pioneers photographers from Argentina.