On the occasion of the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the foundation of the city of Buenos Aires by Pedro de Mendoza in 1536, the photographer Horacio Coppola was commissioned by the municipality of Buenos Aires to portray the city. The resulting photobook was published in 1936 with a cover by the photographer Grete Stern.
Two introductory texts by Alberto Prebisch and Ignacio Anzoategui narrate the history of Buenos Aires. Prebisch, born to a German immigrant father, was a renowned Argentinian architect. Among his most outstanding works is the Obelisk of Buenos Aires, an emblem of the city. In his text for the photobook, he expresses himself as an architect, sketching a city marked by the architectural heritage of colonial times, but later nourished by foreign contributions linked to the open nature of a society that was then highly cosmopolitan. Ignacio Anzoategui's text turns out to be an account of the city's history from its foundation in 1536. Let us emphasise how surprising it is to see the work of Coppola and Stern, universal artists who had fled Nazi Germany, published alongside the writings of Anzoategui, known for his anti-Semitism and his activism within Catholic nationalism.
The heart of the book begins after the two introductory texts and is made up of photographs by Horacio Coppola, for whom the city had been an important subject in his work for years. Map in hand, Coppola traces the route he has chosen to represent the city in the photobook, encompassing both the busy city centre and the outlying districts of the metropolis. Thematic categories can be defined within Coppola's work for this specific commission: views of the city from the air (tracing the map), the presence of water (with the recurring silhouette of the Hotel of Immigrants and the view of the port), social spaces (theatres, cafés, crowded street corners by day), and Buenos Aires at night. Coppola's work reflects the modernity of his photographic technique as well as the role played by his work in the field of photography in Argentina.