Images for a Mythological Foundation. Notes on Horacio Coppola's Photographs of Buenos Aires

Abstract

This article situates Horacio Coppola’s photographs of Buenos Aires from 1929 to 1936 as part of one of the main programs of the porten˜o avant-garde: the criollista quest for identity along the edges of the metropolis, the working class and immigrant suburbs where the avant-garde experimented its double search of synthesis between modernity and tradition, and the city and the pampas. Jorge Luis Borges —with whom Coppola used to explore these distant neighborhoods and who selected two of his first photographs taken there to illustrate the first edition of his Evaristo Carriego in 1930— is a key figure in this quest for identity, and the article postulates that the photographs of Coppola have to be seen as a version and necessary complement of Borges’ “mythological foundation” of Buenos Aires.