Dimensions: support: 762 x 914 mm
Copyright: © Phil Collins, courtesy Kerlin Gallery, Dublin | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: Here we have Phil Collins's photograph, Milan. It's a close-up, and there’s something both vulnerable and unsettling about it. How do you interpret this work? Curator: It whispers of intimacy, doesn't it? But there's a filter, a layer of grass separating us. Are we intruding? Is he hiding? Perhaps it's about the masks we wear, the distance we keep, even when seemingly exposed. What do you think? Editor: That tension between vulnerability and distance is really interesting. I hadn't considered the idea of hiding. Curator: Art, like life, often hides in plain sight!
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This is one of a series of five portraits of young people living in Belgrade. The photographs were taken approximately eight months after the democratic revolution of 5th October 2000, when mass demonstrations in Belgrade and other Serbian cities overthrew the regime of communist leader Slobodan Milosovic (born 1941). Collins photographed individuals he knew well, focusing on close-up and sometimes partial views of their faces as they lay on grass, possibly in a park. In some images, long blades of grass partly obscure the subjects’ faces, casting dark shadows in the bright sunlight. In others, the subject is further away and appears more autonomous from the viewer. The photographs feature rich, saturated colour and a sensual atmosphere created by the juxtaposition of sun-drenched skin in the sun on the grass and the close proximity of a face-to-face encounter. The romantic theme of youth coupled with nature is undercut by the disenchanted gaze of the subjects who, although pictured looking back at the viewer, appear distant and lost in their own thoughts. In this image, Milan’s face has a closed, resentful look at odds with the beautiful, soft light and the profusion of grass and leaves around him. His buttoned-up white shirt and straight hair brushed over his face could belong to any fashionable young man in the western world.
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