This article situates Horacio Coppola's photographs of Buenos Aires from 1929 to 1936 as part of one of the main programs of the porteno 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.