ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #2

Phil Collins @ Wilkinson Gallery

The artist Phil Collins often works with documentary formats, and has made several bodies of work from within international 'trouble spots'. Mark Sladen spoke to him about Young Serbs, a photographic series currently on show at the Wilkinson Gallery in Bethnal Green. Young Serbs consists of strangely intimate portraits of men and women lying in the grass.

MS: Where were these images taken?

PC: The photos were taken in Belgrade in 2001, about 8 months after the 'democratic revolution'. Have you got a mental image of Serbia, or Belgrade? When I first visited in 1999 I had pretty much no picture. Much of the reportage at that time, the familiar images, showed Kosovo, Bosnia, refugees – not Serbs per se. And by 2001 you heard nothing about them. The world had moved on.

MS: How did you choose the people in the photographs?

PC: I used people that I knew well. The process of 'transition' has been economically devastating for huge sections of the population – much like the last ten years under the former regime. The mood at the time, I think it's fair to say, was one of disappointment. People were expecting so much, there was a sense of leaden betrayal after so much anticipation. None of the 'young Serbs' are actually particularly young. In conversation some would talk, not so dramatically, of life having passed them by. What jobs would they get in their late twenties, still not having finished their degree. Or their military service still hanging over them.

MS: Why did you choose to portray them lying in the grass?

DT: I was thinking about the tyranny of recent representations of Serbs, the way photojournalism had cornered the market like a bully. I was thinking about the representational field and those who lie either inside or outside it. I was thinking how Keats wrote fairy-tales at the time of the Poor Law riots, and yet how for him this might also have been a political strategy. To look away from the spectacular and to employ quite simply the lush, the beautiful, the luxurious. What could this mean? I wanted to create an intimate situation (for when else do we see someone lying down?) because intimacy, I was figuring, was one of those values denied by reportage. Ambivalence. Tenderness. Accusations. Invitations. So as well it was written as a kind of love letter. Or more specifically I wanted you to fall in love with them. Or lie with them. Like a shoddy pimp would. Or an evangelist.

Mark Sladen is a curator at Barbican Art Gallery

Phil Collins, Daniela Rossell, Sharon Ya'ari, until 3 November
Wilkinson Gallery, 242 Cambridge Heath Road, E2, 020.8980.2662

Young Serbs (Caca), 2001 (photograph, 76 x 91cm)
© the artist, courtesy Wilkinson Gallery, London

© 2002 KultureFlash Limited