Background
Coppola was born in Buenos Aires, the youngest of 10 children.
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.
Later, in London, he took portraits of famous artists, and worked on a book about Mesopotamian artifacts in the Louvre and the British Museum.
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. They later divorced. In 1959, Coppola married Raquel Palomeque, a pianist.
Coppola was the author of the photographs that appeared in the first edition of "Evaristo Carriego" (biography) (1930) by Jorge Luis Borges. He was one of the pioneers photographers from Argentina and key figure in the Modernism.
He remarried later to Raquel Palomeque.
He was named "Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires" and at 100 had a retrospective exhibit at the Malba Museum in Buenos Aires.