Excavating Perfection: The Photos of Carolyn Gentile

Last night I met up with Denver photographer Carolyn Gentile at the Vine Street Pub, a friendly restaurant with an arsenal of handcrafted beers. It’s Stout Month at the Pub. Over beer and burgers, we discussed her latest photography

Traditionally, Gentile’s work displays a deep commitment to portraiture as she documents friends and lovers flirting, sipping coffee, and living lives of extraordinary beauty. Her portrait work serves as a family photo-album of Denver’s radical, underground, queer community.

“I’m still really amazed at getting to look at the details of how beautiful people are and how perfect everybody is physically,” She said.

Excavating aesthetic perfection in her subjects’ mundane rituals, she finds power in quiet moments of intimacy and solitude. Her work documents strong emotions, occasionally light-hearted, but often grave. Like the music of The Mountain Goats or the films of Jonas Mekas, Gentile’s photographs find ecstasy within private worlds.

Recently, she has taken her work from the domestic to the streets.

“Lately, I’ve been exploring street photography and am trying to work out how you do that in a casual way and still have formal success,” She said. “I’ve been going around neighborhoods taking portraits of streets, houses, alleys, and people in public settings.

Gentile handles her subjects like a fly on the wall, a fly who happens to rigorously compose images and madly loves its surroundings.

“I think there are so many beautiful neighborhoods in Denver and I love getting that on film.”

Whether she’s scrutinizing the rotating door at the 15^th Street Telegraph Building or obsessing over primary colors in abandoned alleys, she continues to document people within neglected landscapes.

“There are so many beautiful buildings in Denver and a lot of them are being torn down to make condos.”

Gentile’s photos are elegiac. As conformity threatens alternative queer cultures and wealthy white yuppies replace gritty urban centers with sterile, faux-lofts, she documents endangered architectural species of Denver with a deft sense of composition and an uncompromising devotion to excavating perfection.

Sadly, her work has gone unnoticed by an art world all too complicit in the destruction of our cities. Not rushing towards the commercial art world, Gentile continues to hone her craft, build her portfolio, and discover perfection in daily life.