In London, Coppola frequently photographed the city’s inhabitants. In his Marxism-tinged review of Grete Stern and Coppola’s 1935 exhibition in Buenos Aires, Argentine critic Jorge Romero Brest praised Coppola’s reportage images of London for “dialectically show[ing] social reality.” In his own writings, Coppola likewise asserted that photography’s social function was to provide a new mode of understanding and expressing reality. Coppola often introduced a note of dark humor into his critically engaged photographs, delighting in the irony of a “totally blind” beggar standing next to a poster that cries “Success!”