Special Issue on Modern Argentine Photography: Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

Special Issue on Modern Argentine Photography: Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern Natalia Brizuela & Alejandra Uslenghi Published online: 03 Jul 2015.

Click for updates To cite this article: Natalia Brizuela & Alejandra Uslenghi (2015) Special Issue on Modern Argentine Photography: Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 24:2, 89-90, DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2015.1061980 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2015.1061980

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2015 Vol. 24, No. 2, 89–90, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2015.1061980

Natalia Brizuela and Alejandra Uslenghi SPECIAL ISSUE ON MODERN ARGENTINE PHOTOGRAPHY: HORACIO COPPOLA

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AND GRETE STERN Over the last decade modern and contemporary Latin American art has gained an increased visibility in major museums and universities in the USA and Europe. This has been partly generated as a result of a ‘global turn’ that has invested in making visible artistic production from parts of the world – mainly Latin America, Africa and the Middle East – that had until recently received little or no attention, and also in recognition that attributes like ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ were categories that could be applied to productions beyond the US-Western Europe axis. MoMA’s ‘Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative (C-MAP)’, the Guggenheim’s ‘UBS MAP Global Art Initiative’, the Getty’s ‘Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA’, and the ‘Estrellita Brodsky’ curatorships in contemporary Latin American art at the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate Modern and MoMA are but some of the venues and platforms through which this move has taken on an institutional form. At the same time, Departments of Art History throughout the USA have begun faculty hires in lines broadly defined as ‘global modernism’ and ‘global contemporary’. If on one hand this widening of the scope of modern and contemporary art is clearly a gain because of the visibility and recognition of artistic practices previously overlooked, and because it means a move beyond past conceptualizations of modernity in those geographical areas deemed marginal, peripheral or primitive (to name only but a few obvious rubrics), on the other hand, the ‘global’ in this scope is sometimes a problematic framework. The often incompatible temporalities and sociopolitical transformations between different regions of the world get frequently eclipsed under the ‘good neighbour policy’ of global initiatives. Simultaneity, homogeneity, and a-historical universalism are the major problems of these kinds of globalisms. But the global today, more than ever, is impossible to deny, thus making crucial the space for new articulations of commonalities and specificities of production from these regions now included and made visible within the USA and Western European academia. This special issue on Horacio Coppola (Argentina 1906 –2012) and Grete Stern (Germany 1904 –Argentina 1999) is a critical intervention within this broader problem of modern and contemporary global art through a detailed study of the vast majority of the work of these photographers. Given the recent prominence Coppola and Stern have gained both in Europe and in the USA through these ‘global’ initiatives on ‘global modernism’ the intervention is timely and needed. The articles in this issue work against the assumption that modern photography ‘arrived’ in Latin America, immersing their practices in a more complex set of relations and trajectories. The trajectories of Stern and Coppola are explored in their full scope, and the essays dig into the many q 2015 Taylor & Francis

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paths that shaped their production. Coppola follows a cosmopolitan itinerary from Latin American to Europe and back, traversed by the influence of cinema and architecture that precedes his Bauhaus training. In the case of Stern, hers is on the one hand a forced migration to Buenos Aires as the result of the rise of fascist regimes in Europe, and later on a deeper insertion into Argentine culture, first working in popular and mass media as well as urban renewal projects, and then travelling through the inner provinces of the northeast. In all of these trajectories, photography acquires different meanings and ‘uses’ that go from documentary, aesthetic experimentation, graphic design to architectural photography. The dossier also makes available in translation the important work of Argentine scholars Adrı´an Gorelik and Luis Priamo, who for several decades now have made sure that the archives and legacies of Coppola and Stern gained, in their local contexts, critical attention. Last, but not least, we have included interviews and programmatic texts by both of them in a section titled ‘From the Archive’. We are extremely grateful to Galerı´a Jorge Mara-La Ruche for their generosity with reproduction rights to the Grete Stern Archive and Horacio Coppola Archive, and to the Matteo Goretti Collection for the rights to reproduce Grete Stern’s photographs from the Chaco series.