What are your impressions from Poland?

When I was here in mid 1990s I was treated much better. Even by the hotel service. I think Polish people are very shy, but they are shy in a very aggressive way. They are not shy in a sweet way, but in a hard way. People are very suspicious here. I think it has something to do with Communism and Catholic Church. Communism was very repressive system. Paweł was my boyfriend for three years. His mother had to escape Poland, because she was a journalist and she was very right-wing. I am very left-wing. When I met him, his name was Paul for 20 years. I said that I will never call him Paul - "What's your real name?" I asked, and he said Paweł. And I said OK. He also changed his surname from Wojtaszek to Walter. When I met him his name was Paul Walter, and then he started to use his real name. He changed his name legally back to Paweł Wojtaszek.

Where did you meet him?

I met him while I was teaching at Yale University, and he was studying painting. He was making his MA.

How did it happen that you came to Poland?

I had a retrospective at the Whitney, and the day after the retrospective Paweł and I decided to make a kind of a honeymoon, and so we came here. We stayed in Warsaw, then we went to Łódź, where he was born. All I saw was the house, where he grew up. We stayed at his grandpa. We went to the school he went to, the playground he went to, and the graveyard of his parents, but it was not there, because nobody took care of it, and so there was somebody else buried. We went to the Jewish cemetery. I heard that there is a beautiful museum, but I have not seen it. I saw the Paweł's world. Then we went to Cracow. This is beautiful city, but I was very upset by the Jewish Ghetto, because they have opened Jewish restaurants, but none of the people were Jewish, they were playing Klezmer music, which is a traditional Jewish-Polish music, and all of them were very kind, but it was all like Hollywood. Horrible. There was the Schindler List Tour and we were sitting in the restaurant and saw the Tour coming back from the concentration camp and all this was like Los Angeles cowboys, you know. All people very hip, girls in nice cowboys shoes. It was so ugly what they done with this fake Jewish Ghetto. They also restored the Synagogue, which is very beautiful, but it does not change much.

Did you take any pictures during your stay in Poland?

Yes, a lot.

Have you published them somewhere?

One of them is going to be in my new book.

Are you planning to show them somewhere?

Milada Ślizińska has spoken to me about it, but I have to go through them once again

During your stay in Poland you took many pictures of Nazi death camps?

As concerns my photographs from the death camps I would have to work hard not to show them in an easy and kitschy way. I have to think about it, because they are important for me, and they are very beautiful.

So what happened to your Polish boyfriend?

We broke up, and I found a new one. He has been engaged twice since then, but we are still good friends. He was going to come to my opening. He calls me on the phone a lot here, and he arranged a shiatsu massage for me when I needed it yesterday. It was very nice. He teaches photography, which he knows nothing about. I think he needs money, and so he calls me every week to find out how he should teach photography. Personally, I teach at Harvard University. They published that the percentage of virgins among the people that graduate from the university is forty percent, so the first class I got I told them that nobody can graduate from my class if s/he is a virgin. I begin my courses talking about safe sex and AIDS. I do it anywhere I teach, except Yale. Yale is too conservative. I am not interested in teaching people technique. I teach people how to look and how to see. I talk about my experiences and my life, which is my photography.

Your approach towards photography is very personal. Is not it a kind of therapy?

Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.

You also help other people to survive. Memory about them does not disappear, because they are on your pictures.

Yes. It is about keeping a record of the lives I lost, so they cannot be completely obliterated from memory. My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them. The people are gone, like Cookie, who is very important to me, but there is still a series of pictures showing how complex she was. Because these pictures are not about statistics, about showing people die, but it is all about individual lives. In the case of New York, most creative and freest souls in the city died. New York is not New York anymore. I lost it and I miss it. They were dying because of AIDS. It is very important to understand that AIDS is not a moral issue, but just a virus. Flu is a virus that kills people, and it is not a moral issue. I hope that the people here in Poland will understand it, because they did not in Prague, where I showed the "I'll be your mirror" exhibition in the mid 1990s. AIDS is not a moral issue it is a virus. I want people here to get to know this, not to make the evasion like that did in Prague. At the press conference, I got to fight with the press. One of the women in the audience was the doctor and she said "What do you think you get AIDS from milk?" I said "No, you get AIDS from blood and from semen, but it does not make it a moral issue." People did not know anything about safe sex. There was conspiracy of silence. There was no sex information given to anyone. There was no condoms allowed to be given at schools. Even now, the government do not give money to fight AIDS because it is a problem of people of color, mostly women. Now, more women than men got AIDS. Every time I have exhibition at the gallery I make one piece that will sell very cheap and so I can give 50,000-70,000$ to the organizations. The last time I gave 75,000$ to the gay men hospices, but only for drug addicts program, because nobody gives them money. The biggest problem is to give money directly to the people, not to people who run the organizations. The virus started in the 1970s, when the gay community was very powerful. It started in Africa, but it is not clear how it was transmitted from Africa to America, but I have friends in South Africa who believe that the government gives people AIDS, and I believe that the government in America gave people AIDS. In 1976-1978 all homosexual men in the United States, who had any kind of sexual dependency, were given hemoglobin shots. I believe the AIDS virus was given to homosexual men this way. The gay community had lot of power - politically and financially. They were one of the biggest powers in the New York City economically. At that time, the gay mayor in San Francisco was shot and gay people were loosing their power. I think the fact that gay community was so powerful was threatening to the government and the Catholic church. David Wojnarowicz, one of my best friends who died of HIV-related sickness, when I told him that it was the government that gave people AIDS, said that it did not matter because the fact that a conspiracy of silence had the same effect as if the government did it. The silence about AIDS ended in late 1980s and early 1990s when the ACT UP started. My friend from South Africa, a journalist, told me that she knows the name of the doctor who gave people AIDS. This conspiracy of silence still exists, and people do not want to talk about it openly. I talk about it openly and people think I am mad. The virus is wiping out Africa and South Africa, where one in four adult people got it.

You decided to leave the United States because of the effect the AIDS epidemics had on the community of New York gay artists and writers?

I left America in 1991 to Europe. I went to Berlin partially because of that, and partially because one of my best friends, Alf Bold, was dying and I stayed with him and took care of him. He had nobody to take care of him. I mean, he had lots of famous friends, but he had nobody to take care of him on a daily basis. He was one of people who invented Berlin film festival. This was the time when also my Paris photo dealer Gilles died of AIDS. He had the most radical gallery in the city. He did not tell anybody in Europe that he has AIDS, because the attitude here was so different than in the United States. There was no ACT UP in Paris, and in 1993 it looked very much like in the US in the 1950s. Now it has changed, but at that time people in Europe told me: 'Oh, we do not need ACT UP. We have very good hospitals'. I think you have very much the same situation here in Poland nowadays. I may be wrong, but this is my impression plus what I have been told by one of Paweł's friends who works for one of organizations fighting with homophobia in Poland, the Coalition Against Homophobia. I noticed homophobia while I was working at the Ujazdowski Castle. Some of the staff helping us to install the exhibition was reacting this way to the pictures. They were too shy to show it openly, but they were shy in this strange way. It was odd, because at any other venue, we had fabulous relations with the installers and here we have great relations with Henryk Gac, but none of the boys was speaking to us. I do not know what is going on, but they are not friendly. They are very "cold shy." It is a different shyness than in let us say Brazil or in Southern Europe or in Morocco. People there are shy, but they are sweet and it is very tender. Here, the shyness is very aggressive. The same happened to me at the Narcotic Anonymous meeting. They were very aggressive to me. It never happened in my life, anywhere in the world. I have gone to such meetings in Sweden, Finland, even in Bangkok, where they did not speak English, and still were very friendly. Here, they were very cold and they were suspicious of me. During the break in the meeting, they ask me if I was a psychoanalyst who was visiting them. It was horrible.

Your art is basically socially engaged…

It is very political. First, it is about gender politics. It is about what it is to be male, what it is to be female, what are gender roles... Especially The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is very much about gender politics, before there was such a word, before they taught at the university. A friend of mine said I was born with a feminist heart. I decided at the age of five that there was nothing my brothers can do and I cannot do. I grew up that way. It was not like an act of decision that I was going to make a piece about gender politics. I made this slideshow about my life, about my past life. Later, I realized how political it was. It is structured this way so it talks about different couples, happy couples. For me, the major meaning of the slideshow is how you can become sexually addicted to somebody and that has absolutely nothing in common with love. It is about violence, about being in a category of men and women. It is constructed so that you see all different roles of women, then of children, the way children are brought up, and these roles, and then men, then it shows a lot of violence. That kind of violence the men play with. It goes to clubs, bars, it goes to prostitution as one of the options for women - prostitution or marriage. Then it goes back to social scene, to married and re-married couples, couples having sex, it ends with twin graves. Sophie Calle saw my slideshow and then she started doing twin graves. Now, people think I got the idea from her. It is the same as that I use the song "I put the spell on you" long before the Jarmush movie. People used to react very lively to that song, and now they just say "Oh, I know it."

Could you please tell us something about people, artists who have influenced your art?

My biggest influences are my friends. Bruce Baldoni was one of first persons that introduced me to slide shows in the 1970s. He did them and so John Waters and Cookie Miller would come over to the house. This was his idea and so that was the influence on me to start slide shows. I started doing slide shows because I left school. During school I went to live in Provincetown, a gay resort, which is at the end of Boston. It is the farthest point in America's east coast. It is beautiful. It is a little community of artists. Norman Mailer lives there. A lot of painters and writers live there. In the 1970s it was really wild with Waters, Cookie, Sharon, and Sharon's son. It was incredibly wild. Later everything has completely changed.

The same happened to New York?

I do not know. I have not been to New York for years. In Provincetown we used to live in small groups. I took lots of pictures of my friends, like "Bruce in the snow". I know Bruce since 1972. We lived together with Bruce, Sharon, and Cookie. I was at the School at the Museum of Fine Arts. Those days the school was that teachers sat in the parking lot and drank. Literally. This was before the 1980s. We were told that we will never make any money on art. Now, the students that I teach, at Yale particularly, all they want to know is what gallery they could have show in or could I help them to get a show. They go right from the graduate school to the big galleries. It is all career move. When I went to the art school, I never heard of art forum. Never. I took classes in Russian literature, in Faulkner whom I love, I took writing classes, I took the history of film, I took drawing to be able to see better, because many photographers cannot see anything. In art school, I would cut my hair - they were very long and brown - then I cut it and I dyed blond, and nobody even noticed. That is how I knew that people were not looking at anything. I notice if somebody cuts one hair on her head. I took drawing and painting to see better. I tried everything just because I already done the black and white pictures, so I was immediately put in the advanced photography. There was a seminar once a week with a drunk teacher. They just told us their philosophy, really drunk. For the rest of their time they sat in their cars and kept on drinking. It was important, because we were told that the pursuit of art was very difficult and only for those who were chosen and really driven to do it, because you will never make money and you will starve for the rest of your life. Only about five percent of the people who went to the art school became artists. It all has changed in the 1980s.

Those days also the artistic photography was different. It was supposed to black and white.

That was in the early 1970s and these are late 1970s.

Yes, but you were one of few photographers who started to take color pictures. How did it happen?

I accidentally used the roll of color film in my camera. I thought it is black and white, but it was color.

Unlike Egglestone and other photographers using color, your pictures were discovered quite late.

Some people discovered my photography early. It was just very underground. It was very good what they taught us at the art school: that you have to suffer to be an artist; that you do not need material, financial success, but you have to be driven. Lot of great artists came out of my school from that period. Some of them are my friends like David Armstrong and Philip Lorca diCorcia. During that school, I got worse so I went to Provincetown to live. I had no darkroom there, and in order to get a credit at school I did the slide show and I came back. When I first started to take pictures of drag queens my influences were glamour magazines, fashion magazines. I like Horst, Cecil Beaton, and early work of NewtonI like Guy Bourdin. I did not know about art photography. In 1974, I went to school and there was a teacher who showed me Larry Clark. It has entirely changed my work. I knew that there had been somebody else, who had done their own lives. You know his book Tulsa? I knew that were precedents for using one's private experiences as art.

So you just switched from this glamour photography to this very personal approach?

No, I did not just switched. It was a long process of learning about history of photography. He introduced me to August Sander, Weegee, Diane Arbus. The drag queens hated the work of Arbus. It was not allowed in the house, because they hated the way she photographed drag queens. She tried to strip them of their identity. She did not respect the way they wanted to be. Arbus is a genius, but her work is about herself. Every picture is about herself. It is never respecting the way the other person is. It is almost psychotic need to try to find another identity, so I think that Arbus tries on the skin of other people. I have written a lot about Arbus.

Some critics find connections between you and Arbus. What do you think about such comparisons?

The daughter of Arbus thinks that there is no connection at all. I think there is some connection, because both of us have unusual degree of empathy, but it is manifested in a different way. She was a photographic genius and I am not a photographic genius. My genius, if I have any, is in the slideshows, in the narratives. It is not in making perfect images. It is in the groupings of work. It is in relationships I have with other people.

Is not it connected with your fascination with literature? You mentioned Faulkner…

Faulkner wrote about one tiny community and he wrote around 25 great novels and many short stories. They are always set in the place he loves. It has invented name, but it is a real place. It is all based on what he knows. I always fought strongly against traditional documentary photography. It has changed, but in the 1970s it was always white strong men going to India making exotic pictures of something they have no idea of. I always felt that I have right to photograph only my own tribe or people, when I travel, to whom I get close to and that I gave something to. I never took pictures with a long lens it is always short and I have to get close to people I photograph. I have the right to photograph only my own tribe and my tribe is extended throughout Europe, but I left New York in the 1990s to get away from AIDS and I moved to Paris three years ago to get away from George Bush.

And you got Chirac…

Well, he is better than Bush. Back to my influences. I was very influenced by film, because I did not go to high school. I went to the movies. Sometimes I went to the movies two or three times per day. I saw every movie from the 1940s and the 1950s. I saw every movie where all that goddesses were. Every movie with Marlena Dietrich, every movie with Bettie Davies, every movie with Barbara Stanwyck, every movie with Marylin Monroe. Then I saw enormous amount of Italian movies with Antonioni, Pasolini, de Sica…

Did you make any movies?

Yes, I made two documentaries. "I'll Be Your Mirror" was made with BBC. It is about my life. The other was made with Joana and Aurele. It is about AIDS and it is called "Ballad at the Morgue." He has AIDS and she does not. It is about a couple, about a relation of a couple, where one person is HIV positive and the other is not. The film has only been shown in Turin.

What is the relation between the diary you write and the pictures you take?

Nothing. My diary is really boring.

Have not you tried to put together both diaries, textual and visual, and do something like Peter Beard?

No. I think these are two different things…

When have you started to write your diary?

I started to read very early. I was addicted to letters from the early childhood. I started to write my diary when I was around 12 years old and it helped me to survive when I was a teenager.

Have you ever published parts of this diary?

No, I would never do this. I am writing it for myself and nobody else. My wish is to burn it immediately after my death… Back to my influences, I was very influenced by Cassavetes. When I am influenced, unlike many other contemporary photographers, I would never take a scene from the movie. I was very influenced by Fassbinder and Kieślowski. I saw his "Ten Commandments." How do you pronounce his name? Yes, he is very important to me. Also Fassbinder was important. I saw all his works.

What about music?

Yes, it is very important to me. Now, I am very influenced by Nick Cave. He saved my life, literally.

Do you know Diamanda Gallas?

Yes, I like her very much, even though I have never met her. I always wanted to meet her. I heard that she is a wonderful person. Her brother died of AIDS. She is also fighting against those who treat AIDS as a moral issue. I think the same is going to happen here, just as it happened in Prague and in Italy two weeks ago when I gave interview to the TV and people tried to say: "Take the lifestyle you have shown in 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency', and then everybody die of AIDS." There is no relation between lifestyle and AIDS. I read a lot communist texts in the 1960s and I dug out all my moral beliefs from that. I still believe the same thing. I still believe in equality of men and in Marxist philosophy, although I am not a Stalinist. I used to be a Stalinist in my childhood. My parents were very leftish and engaged in labor unions and so on. My father was even imprisoned in the forties for his leftish radicalism. I was growing up in such an ideological environment. They called us 'red-diaper babies'…

In the 1960s the sexuality was considered a form of freedom. I was very young - 13 or 14. We really believed we are going to change the world and we did for a short time. However, I still know people who say "Oh, sixties - vodka and drugs." These are the people who remember only the drugs, but do not remember the politics, esthetics, philosophy. I still believe in all that: that the government is very dangerous; that the best possible structure is anarchy, and that sexuality is a form of freedom. David and I, we remember Stonewall. We were marching in the first Gay Pride marches in the early 1970s, when we were teenagers. It was such a joyous time and such a powerful time. The idea that people could have all different sexualities and that all sexualities are good. Sometimes I am with men, sometimes with women. Sometimes I am a man, sometimes a woman. People can change their gender and be what they want to be. All these got distorted by AIDS. I think your generation is equalizing sex and death.

Well, nowadays it is an individual issue. If you like you can be promiscuous or not…

It was not about promiscuity. It was out of love. Promiscuity is a very pejorative word. It was not promiscuity. It was freedom.

It seems to me that this message of the generation 1968 is still valid for young people. That is why your pictures are so well received by youngsters.

One of the young people from the Museum [the Ujazdowski Castle], who was installing the show said he did not like homosexuals. The director is having really hard time with pictures of gay men. He has not asked me to take out the pictures, but he has implied that it would be easier for him if I did. He has never asked me to do so. I found out that he censored Serrano's "Piss Christ." I hear that Milada fights hard, but he keeps talking to me every time I pass him. He grabs me to talk about his lawyer. Then he talks how he was in jail because of Solidarity and he has got his radical theatre, but it is obvious that he is homophobic. I think he is actually upset, because one of my friends' penises is so big. I think it is issue of size. Women do not suffer from penis envy. Men suffer from penis envy. Please, publish this: "Director worried about size… of pictures."

But your pictures open people…

Yeah, I got many letters from people in my life. I got stacks and stacks of letters. People who thank me for saving their lives. Lot of people told me they left their small towns and live in New York because of the Ballad of Sexual Dependency. When "The Other Side" came out as a book, I got many letters from people who, for instance, live in small towns in Germany. They were very isolated and they wanted to drag or something. They are very touchy.

Some of your pictures are blurred. You did it on purpose?

Actually, I take blurred picture, because I take pictures no matter what the light is. If I want to take a picture, I do not care if there is light or no light. If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what. Sometimes I use very low shutter speed and they come out blurred, but it was never an intention like David Armstrong started to do what we call, he and I, "Fuzzy woozy landscapes." He looked at the back of my pictures and studied them. He started to take pictures like them without people in them. They are just out of focus landscapes. He actually did it intentionally through the camera out of focus. I have never done it in my life. I take pictures like in here when there is no sun or light that I think all my pictures are going to be out of focus. Even Valerie and Bruno and whatever I take, because there is not enough light, and so I use a very low shutter speed. It used to be because I was drunk, but now I am not. The drugs influenced all my life. Both, good and bad. I heard about an artist in Poland, Witkacy, who wrote down on his paintings all the drugs he was on. Depending how many drugs he took, that is how much he charged for the portrait. I saw his portrait at the National Museum, a kind of German expressionism, and I loved it.

Witkacy was also a very good photographer, even better than painter. He also took pictures of himself dressed up.

The same with Pierre Mollinier, he thought his paintings are art, but they are really crap, and he was taking portraits of himself, which are really beautiful.

Did drugs influence your works?

I took LSD when I was 14, so I tell my friends that instead of studying postmodern theory they should take LSD, because when you take LSD you know that there is no real reality, that all reality is invented, not real. If you know this thing you do not need to study it. In the beginning, drugs were not a problem. Everybody was smoking pot. I started to smoke pot in 1969. As a teenager, I did not take any drugs seriously, but when I was 18 I started heroin. I had wanted to be a junkie, because of Lou Reed's album. I found an older man and I moved to his flat. From 1972 on, I took heroin occasionally, but before 1984 I got very addicted to it. Then I got clean in 1984, and then drugs again and then another detox, drugs, detox, drugs, detox. Then I broke my arm and I got to hospital and I left it three months ago. I think the darker you go the brighter it gets. Only those who have experienced it, know what I am talking about. Without photography, I would not survive. Every time you relapse, it gets worse. Now, I am very clean. Anyway, I actually became very influenced by Rothko. I love work of Richard Todd, but I cannot say he was an influence. Anything that I see and I love is an influence, but I never try to replicate somebody else like I never tried to make Rothko. I love Caravaggio, but I never studied Caravaggio. I never made any Caravaggio. Some of my pictures of boys having sex they have the same sense of light as Caravaggio. Caravaggio also knew all the people that he painted. They were his lovers or hustlers. Pasolini used boys from the street that he loved that he desired. Fassbinder only used people he knew. Cassavetes used the same people over and over, so I am not the first one to do that, but I think that people have forgotten how radical my work was in the 1980s, when I started, because nobody was doing work like that. Now, so many people have done work like that like Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller, Corinne Day… Now people think I am just one of many who's done that. They do not understand that The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was so radical when it came out. The years between 1978 and 1986, when the Ballad was published I was traveling around the world doing the slideshows by myself. I went all over the world - to Finland, northern Sweden, Spain, all over the Europe. It was really hated by male photographers. They gave me a lot of shit, in America in particular.

People from that tradition of Minor White and Alfred Stieglitz?

Yeah, I got beaten up at one photo conference in Baltimore. One male photographer punched me in my nose and he broke it. You can see this on the photograph called "Cookie and me after I was punched." That was at the photo conference. Men hated me and it had something to do with gender politics. I told you. I got wooed by lot of male photographers, especially when I showed the slideshows.

What about female photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Cindy Sherman, or Sally Mann. Do they like your pictures?

Yes, they like them.

I saw your pictures in the 50th anniversary issue of the Aperture magazine. What shocked me most was the relation between them and the new Leica ad - this one with your hands holding the M7, very artistic and black and white - I never thought of your photography being as classic as Leica.

I always use Leica. Previously it was M6, and recently I work with M7 camera. I received one as a salary for this particular ad. However, I immediately lost it while photographing "Valerie floating" series. I was swimming with her holding my camera in one hand and taking pictures at the same time. It was really difficult. The camera got broken, but the photographs were really worth the price.

How do you feel having these radical works being shown at the most prestigious museums?

In Paris, for instance, I had a choice between the Centre Pompidou, where all the people go, and the most beautiful museum in Paris, Musee de la Ville de Paris. I liked the women who worked at the museum, but I also loved the man who was taking over the Pompidou. I am very loyal to anybody who has helped me, especially before I was famous. Some told me that I should choose this beautiful museum, but I chose the Pompidou, because I wanted people to see it. To the beautiful museum go only artists and elites.

One more question, have you ever met Kathy Acker? I wrote about her and I thought about you two…

Yeah, I met her many times in social situations. We had the same friends.

She was also a part of the New York art scene in the late 1970s.

Yes, but it was a huge group of people. I met her in Paris once, in a bookstore. She lived in London for a while.

She left the States because of Reagan…

I was going to leave because of Raegan too, and because of Bush number one. But when Bush number two came I said it is over. I have not been to the States for a while.

What are you going to do next? After the Devil's Playground and the Matthew Marks show in New York?

I do not know. I never know. I think it is going to be something different, because I have been through hard times. We will see how the market will react to this, but I do not care about the art market at all. My dealers are becoming greedier and greedier. They start talking to me in this strange way saying "We will show this and this picture, because they are going to sell good." I am worried about that they no longer even pretend to have any ideals. At least my American dealers.