Images, texts and contexts of modern photography in Argentina: a view of Horacio Coppola?s and Grete Stern?s work

VERÓNICA TELL

Nueva York

Workshop; Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP); 2014

Museum of Modern Art - MOMA

I was invited as a visiting scholar on April 10 2014 for a meeting that is part of the Museum's global research initiative entitled "Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) in a Global Age: A Program for Research at The Museum of Modern Art."In 1935, the editorial offices of Sur magazine hosted an exhibition of Horacio Coppola?s and Grete Stern's work, which was to be considered the first on modern photography in Argentina. In the rise of Nazism, the photographers left Berlin where they had met, at photography Bauhaus' courses by Walter Peterhans -who inspired the short statement they wrote for their exhibition in Buenos Aires. The text and exhibition were the starting point for a long article by incipient art critic Jorge Romero Brest about photography and its aesthetic and social value, published in Sur. It was also in this magazine that Coppola had published some of his pictures a few years earlier. In this way, Victoria Ocampo's magazine played a significant role in the diffusion of a new aesthetic and ideas about photography. I highlight this because my presentation will focus on Coppola and Stern´s modernist language and its place in the local cultural context and the field of photography in particular. In addition to the aesthetic choices they made, I will analyze the intellectual and political context and the spaces in witch they worked or played a role.