British-born photographer Phil Collins's New York solo debut is two shows in one. On the third floor of Maccarone are selections from the 2002 series “Real Society,” in which Collins invited (via newspaper ad) anyone age eighteen to eighty-eight to strip for the camera in the penthouse suite of a San Sebastian hotel. The meat of the exhibition, though, is on the first two floors, where a video and photographs from Belfast, Belgrade, and Palestine document places and people facing social or political unrest. How to Make a Refugee, 2000, an eleven-minute DVD, betrays Collins's misgivings about the intrusiveness of the camera: His lens wanders behind a group of British photojournalists posing a family of Kosovar refugees; as if embarrassed by their ordeal, Collins can't quite concentrate on the Kosovars—the camera, occasionally out of focus, often seems to be trained on the floor.

One floor up, the scarred bodies of Collins's photographed subjects are imbued with emotional resonance: The viewer feels for Mici, pictured in an almost all-black print the night before her conscription into the Serbian army, and for Abbas Amini, an Iranian Kurd whose eyes, ears, and mouth are sewn shut. Images of Sinisa, the artist's Serbian boyfriend, fill one section of the show. He is pictured with a broken nose; bathed in a cool blue light; and obscured by the hot yellowish orange of overexposed film. Collins's lyrical photographs invert Sebastião Salgado's theatricalization of misery, focusing instead on human detail; his subjects speak volumes without giving too much away.