Betweem his exhibition Becoming More Like Us and nightly outdoor screenings of his video Mislim Neznam/I Mean I Don't Know, Phil Collins has a substantial presence in Temple Bar at the moment. So, by implication, does Serbia, because part of the aim of his images, both still and moving, is to jog our memories. "When did you last see Serbia mentioned in the media?" he inquires, rhetorically. "It's sort of disappeared because it's ceased being a problem."

Reviewed

Phil Collins: Becoming More Like Us, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin until March 9th (01-6710073); Mislim Neznam/I Mean I Don't Know,Tuesday-Saturday, 8-11 p.m, Meeting House Square, Dublin, until March 2nd

His video, put together over the past few weeks, and so delivered at something like a journalistic pace, is an account of his fumbling efforts to get behind the headlines, to find out about what is happening in Belgrade and how people are living there now. The term "fumbling" is not disparaging.

Rather than offering us neat sound bites, authoritative summaries and happy endings, the split-screen video is jagged and inconclusive. People struggle to express themselves clearly. Rather than editing out the hesitations and digressions, Collins seems to relish them. They are, in a sense, the point. "It's about the difficulties of communication. There's lots of awkwardness, people searching for words and not always finding them."

Similarly, his photographs, at Temple Bar Gallery, offer us fragmentary glimpses into the lives of their subjects. The images are for the most part portraits, casual in approach but very big and glossy. The titles impart snippets of information - a little girl has been diagnosed with cancer, a woman cries on the morning her boyfriend leaves to do military service.

It is enough to give us a sense of the lives extending before and after the moment the photographs were taken, but not so much that we know how things work out or how they began.

Collins's images of faces are sensitive and empathic. In some cases, their air of casual intimacy, of personal involvement, recalls Nan Goldin, but Collins says that, while he admires Goldin's work, he has never regarded her as an influence.

For him, it is not so much moments of personal history as the way images are situated in the wider cultural framework that matters most. He therefore tries "to point out difficulties between the image and its subject matter". And he is trying to make images that militate against inclusion in what might be called the dominant media narrative.

"My process is about asking questions of the documentary method." He argues that, in their coverage of places like Serbia, Western news organisations tend to tailor their output to suit Western political imperatives. "The West always orientalises cultures like that of Serbia." He has made numerous trips there over the past few years. "I'd been to Macedonia, to the refugee camps . . . well, actually, what I was doing was to follow crews of journalists taking pictures of refugees. And it seemed to me that it was so scripted and fixed, so politically determined."

Because he has, as he puts it, a Christmas phobia, he usually spends Christmas outside western Europe. In 1999 he went to Belgrade. "I arrived with my little suitcase to find it was about 20 below and I couldn't get into a hotel." He eventually found somewhere to stay and has made frequent visits since. Several of those who feature in his work are people he's got to know quite well in the interim.

In his reports of a society making a transition from pariah state, following the "democratic revolution" of October 2000, which ousted Milosevic, to a European country "more like us", he looks for the close-grained reality of people's daily lives, for the confusion and contradictions that elude easy summary.

Because he aims to introduce a little friction into the slick business of news production, he can be demanding of the viewer, denying us the neatness and concentration we expect. And while his work does not present information in a systematic, journalistic way, it is clear that the awareness of such information underlies the images.

He visited an oncology clinic, for example, "because the quality of healthcare provides a good marker of how a society is doing, what its priorities are, and the treatment of cancer patients is a particular test of a health service".

An earlier photographic series, You're Not The Man You Never Were, documented Collins's own battle with testicular cancer. He was born in Warrington, in England, and he is now based in Belfast, where he went to complete a fine-art MA. He'd previously studied literature and taught film theory at the University of London.

In the past couple of years he has been extraordinarily busy. Last year he was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Art Award, a bursary of £30,000 sterling and the PS1 Scholarship, in New York.

Given his interest in questioning media representations of contentious cultural landscapes, television seems an obvious arena. In fact, he completed a short film for Channel 4's post-news slot last year.

Everyone A Cut Away, also about the former Yugoslavia, was broadcast on the evening of September 10th. With the horrors of the next day it wasn't, he notes wryly, great timing.