© My Quiet of Gold by Cooper & Gorfer at Gestalten Space. An exhibition from The Hasselblad Foundation.

Artist team Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer revel in the other side of digital photography. Instead of the ubiquitous, instantaneous snapshot, Cooper & Gorfer devote hours to composing and digitally augmenting each photo, ending with a surreal image of almost-impenetrable depth. Sometimes only a simple color filter is needed to make an austere backdrop of mountains suddenly loom into the foreground; sometimes everything but a woman’s face is digitally replaced with rich, fantastic prints and colors. Depth has no fixed value in Cooper & Gorfer’s work, and light is even less reliable.
     When the technique is applied to portraiture, the resulting narrative implications are arresting. My Quiet of Gold, now at Gestalten Space in Berlin through November 27th, features a series of portraits made in rural Kyrgyzstan of locals who first recounted their own remarkable personal histories to the photographers through interviews and conversations. Taken as a whole, the exhibition offers the sum of a story without conforming to sequential form, and without ever speaking a word.

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