For the first time in ten years Nan Goldin is back in London. Best known for "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," her poignant slide show flipping through  photos of New York's gay subculture (to which shebelonged in the late 1970s and early 1980s), Goldin's work has often been grittily personal, unraveling like a pictorial stream of consciousness. Today Goldin's phot has little to do with autobiography. For her solo show at London's Sprovieri Gallery, the artist presents, together with a series of landscapes and grid works, a new version of her slide show "Fire Leap." This collection of images of children, most of which have never been shown before, presents childhoodas a state of freedom, unspoiled by society's rules and imposed sexual identities. Goldin talked to ARTINFO UK about her motivation, the2000 United States presidential election, and why the art world wants her dead.

When people think about your work, they don't necessarily think children.

What do they think about?

They think transvestites, New York....

Junkies....

They think adults. They think underground scenes, not children.

People have gotten stuck on certain things, but my work has completely changed — and not just that slide show. Everything.

How has it changed?

I don't take pictures of people very often any more. There's about five people left in the world I photograph.

Why is that?

I'm not the same person, so I'm not going to do the same work. It's not achoice. I don't decide I'm going to change because of the market, I don't decide I'm gonna change because [art] is a product, or because it's a project. We did have a community. I'm not part of that community anymore because we are older. Our politics and our sociological belief system, all that is the same, but most people aren’t doing drugs anymore. Life has changed. The children in "Fire Leap" are the children of my friends, and they are not all heterosexual. Children are gay people too. I've discovered lots of other things in my life besides my loft on the Bowery.

You've expanded your world. Are children more present in this new world?

This new world happened around 1989. People just hadn't caught on that my work changed completely. In the 1990s, I put out this British book "The Devil's Playground," and I think that's very different. It's filledwith light, there's some joy in it. It's not all darkness, even though there's death in it too. This show at Sprovieri is the first one I've ever done that doesn't have any death, the first one that's not painful to the viewer. I haven't become a happy, joyous, and free person, but I'm much more interested in the state of things. Here I'm showing a few landscapes that I've been taking since the 1970s, and a couple of new, grid pieces.

Why this format of the grid?

Because they are like mini slide shows on the wall. My mode is slide shows, and books.

Are these grids somewhat halfway between a slide show and a book?

Yes. There have been a number of grids all along, but one grid that I'm showing now exemplifies the changes in my work. I'm interested in shape-shifting, and I'm interested in "Scopophilia," the project I just did at the Louvre. I was invited by [2010 Louvre guest curator] Patrice Chéreau to be part of his "Patricoramma." He was treating me like a deadartist, so we went our separate ways, but fortunately I had made contact with Marie-Laure Bernardac, who is the curator of contemporary art at the Louvre. We became very close and she was the one I was working with. I didn't have anything to do with Chéreau. He put a few pictures in his exhibition ["Les Visages et les Corps"] but he chose which ones and where they went. When I said, "I thought it was a collaboration," he answered, "Delacroix is not saying where his picturesshould go." I said, "Guess what? He's dead."

Is it important for you to have this relationship with your photographs once they are done? Is the conceptualization of how they arepresented a key part of your work?

I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until Ican do something better.

You've done a couple of films, including "I'll Be Your Mirror" with the BBC in 1995. Is that where you want to go?

That's what I like. I've got strong things going on now. There are certain books that I want to make films of. I don't want any more autobiography in my life. I have said way too much about myself and I feel very exploited. "Sisters, Saints, & Sybils" [2006] was the end of my self-representation.

With this installation and book, you went to the very bottom of the mostdifficult thing that happened in your childhood: your older sister's suicide in 1965.

The piece was to be shown at the Salpêtrière, which was originally a mental hospital. I thought OK, I'm in a mental hospital, I have to do something about mental illness, which has been of extreme importance to me. I worked with a collaborator and it was her idea to do the scenography that really makes the piece. It's an installation, in which you are trapped. Three hundred and fifty people fainted in France. I've always wanted to make people laugh and cry, throw up. Fainting was pretty good. In the last years, I've started collaborating with people and I want to do more. "Sisters, Saints, & Sybils" was very collaborative and so was "Fire Leap" and the piece at the Louvre.
 
Considering how close you are to most of your subjects, I was wondering if you see your relationship with them as collaboration.

There's no difference between them and me — otherwise I don't shoot them. But when I say "collaboration," it's more about the editing. One of the reasons why I've loved slide shows all these years is because youcan constantly re-edit them. You can't do that with a movie.

Do you think you'll ever reach the limit of the slide show?

Yes, I did in 1992. I stopped changing the "Ballad." And then, years later, MoMA came to me and they wanted to buy it. I worked for a year making a new version. MoMA wasn't very pleased. They didn't want anything with light. They wanted it to be all the old, very dark, very depressing stuff.

Do you feel trapped in this image of darkness, in what people expect your work to be like?

No. I just think they want me to cut myself, and they have for a long time. Most of the art world wants me to commit suicide.

Why?

Because my work would be worth more. I heard that said about somebody, one of my best friends who had AIDS, "You'd better buy the work now, because after he's dead it's going to be more valuable." And the people who don't say it believe it. They like a dead artist. Then they wouldn'thave to deal with my personality, which can be difficult, and could make up all the myth I already made up anyway. They've wanted me to die for years. But I don't feel sorry for myself. It's not a tragic statement. I just find it interesting that they find live artists much more threatening.

When did you move to Europe?

I got stuck in New York for a long time. It was wonderful from 1978 to 1985, and then it wasn't. But it's hard for me to leave. I talk about itall the time. When I was in Boston, all we did was talk about when we're going to move to New York. Some of those people are still there, talking about when they are going to move to New York. I always talked about when I was going to move to Europe. So I thought, well, I might aswell do something I say I'm going to do. I said I was going to go for political reasons, so when Bush stole the election from Gore in 2000, I left. But it didn't have a huge political impact on the world — in fact,nobody noticed (laughs). I recently met Gore's photographer. She was with him when he lost, and I asked her to describe everything about the way Gore reacted. He called Bush and said, "The count is unfair." He confronted him. He said, "What's this Florida business?" Usually they call and say congratulations, like at the tennis court. He turns out that he wasn't so happy. So when Bush won, I thought, fuck him. My sister was very political.

Do you think your own political opinions have been influenced by hers?

I think my view of the world was enormously shaped by her. From the age of 15, she wanted to get out of the suburbs. She was so far advanced. Ifshe had lived at a different time, and if she had met the right people,she would have survived. It's shocking because she was brilliant. When she killed herself, in her purse she had that quote about how "Life is nothing but unfathomable regrets." It's a really famous piece of poetry,maybe T.S Eliot. I never said it, I've never realized it maybe, but shewas an enormous influence on me.

Tell me about the landscapes. You've been doing them for so long but rather secretly. It's almost paradoxical: in your work, your private life was what is revealed, and the landscapes, which are usually considered less personal, were very private.

Yes, that was my secret work. I had never showed it to anyone and when Ifinally showed it to somebody in 1989, they said, "That’s what you've been hiding all along." The work looks like it's from another planet. It's about the process of breaking the glass between me and the world, and getting over the postcard.

Is that what you are trying to do with photography in general, "breaking the glass"?

Yes. I've always done that with people, I think. One of the great tragedies is that we can't see our own faces. And another tragedy is that we can't totally enter another person's skin.

Does that mean that we are completely alone?

Yes. I hate to say it. I thought we weren't, but we are. But you know, my work is no longer dependent on my personal feeling system. The "ShapeShifting 1" grid for example is not about any of the things my work's been about. It's about transformation, fluidity, life, and identity. It's where I want to go, looking at states of being — darkness, or blindness — rather than at a specific person. If I called the grid by the name of the subject, people would recognize her as somebody who is in my work — but it doesn't have to do with her so much.She had a sex change, but there's nothing in the title because I don't think it's my right to say whether or not she had a sex change — even though I’m saying it now. Ethically, I have very good ideas, I don't always live up to them (laughs).

Could you see yourself stopping photography?

Photography? I don't do photography. I like some photographers, but I'm not a photographer. When Matthew Marks came to convince me to work with him, he convinced me I was an artist — so I kind of believed it, and nowpeople talk about me as a photographer.

Isn't a photographer an artist?

No, anybody can take a picture. Now, you don't even have to be a person,you can be a telephone. There were always too many pictures in the world and today there are billions of pictures. Photography has become less and less real, and my whole motivation is gone, wiped. I became a photographer to make a record that no one could revise, and now anyone can revise it. I gave a talk at the Tate a couple of years ago, and I asked an audience of 200 people how many of them believed that photography was still a true statement. Five people raised their hands.
 
Is this how you wanted it to be? You wanted photography to be a true statement?

Yes, but people won’t believe it anymore. In 1976, I had my first major solo show at the Whitney. Another photographer gave a lecture and said that I set my pictures up. He was ahead of his time. It was before Photoshop. Now I'm sure everyone thinks my pictures are set up.

Do you feel that people are misreading you?

All the time. We weren't a marginalized community, we didn't give a fuckabout straight people. We were our own world, straight people were marginalized from us. So, everyone got it wrong. I didn't take pictures of people because they were prostitutes or drug addicts. These were my friends, this was my life.

If your motivation is gone now, why do you still make works?

My motivation is to stay alive, to live another day. And I can't do thatwithout making art.