C100 Review : Phil Collins

Phil Collins: Becoming more like us, 2002, Lambda print; courtesy Temple Bar Gallery and Studios

Dublin: Phil Collins at Temple Bar Gallery and Kerlin Gallery

 As pieces of photo-journalism, the recent Dublin shows of Phil Collins are interesting to see. And if photographers like Robert Kappa and Lee Miller can be exhibited at the Gallery of Photography why not Collins at the Kerlin and TBG&S? Anyway, Duchamp dealt with the debates around what can be considered art highly effectively when he imported his (although not perhaps 'his' in the personal sense) urinal and bicycle wheel into a gallery and declared, to paraphrase, I am an artist, this is a gallery, and therefore this is art. So in considering the exhibition Becoming More Like Us, and the series Enduring Freedom in terms of art rather than as works of photo-journalism, what exactly are we are looking at?

Beyond redundant questions of 'is it art', there still persists an anxiety of the authenticity of photography as a genuine art medium. One way this seems to be addressed at the moment is through scale and execution. If the work is an enormous cibachrome, or if it's in a light box, it can't be a holiday snap or magazine shot. There is no mistaking Collins for a journalist or a Saturday snapper because his images are glossy and beautifully large. His light boxes are expertly made, and his captions demonstrate that these are images to consider carefully. In his shots of Americans, taken after 9.11, and of post-revolution Serbs, Collins has captured a cross section of humanity in portraits which call to mind the tableaux of Jeff Wall - although the true tension in Wall's work comes from the fact that the images are so carefully choreographed.

It is interesting to see faces from Belgrade, and there is a beauty in the US light boxes, but what is there that we wouldn't see in the Sunday Times or Observer supplement? This isn't a question of simply sniping at photography, the arguments around photorealism as a post-conflict artistic medium are well established. The use of photography to depict artistic 'realities' took a theoretical battering after the fall of European Fascism at the end of the Second World War. Its position, that it purports to depict an absolute version of reality, had already been tarnished by Soviet and Fascist manipulations, and post-war art developed a deliberately anti-representational stance to try to deal with the distortion of visual-fact that the war had so fundamentally engendered.

Phil Collins: Sanja, the morning Vlada left for the army, 2002, Lambda print; courtesy Temple Bar Gallery and Studios

Yet Collins's work seems to have struck a cord, and he has received numerous prizes and awards,. But in the context of this argument, his work is a step back, and his images and captions can appear a little to easy and glib. Are the Serbians becoming more like us? Does an image of children with skate boards, or one of a woman crying because her boyfriend is leaving for his national service demonstrate a deeper level of reality because we are told that these are Eastern Europeans? What is captured in these images beyond the exoticism of location? And, in the traditions of post-war theoretics and the more interesting manufactured realities of Wall and Cindy Sherman, how can we rely on the authenticity of the images anyway. To take the title of Collins' accompanying (Temple Bar) video, Mislim Ne Znam/I Mean I Don't Know.

Gemma Tipton is a writer.

Phil Collins, Becoming More Like Us, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios Dublin, February/March 2002

Phil Collins, Kerlin Gallery Dublin, March/April 2002

Article reproduced from CIRCA 100, Summer 2002, pp. 72-74

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