Disposable cameras

We can't trust photographs. In fact, we never could. In an exclusive interview, David Hockney tells Jonathan Jones why painting creates a more reliable record of the truth
Manipulated image of David Hockney
Lies, damn lies and photographs: composite image made up of two separate photographs of David Hockney and electronically manipulated by the Guardian. Photo: David Sillitoe; image: Lisa Foreman Guardian

"Do you know what Edvard Munch said about photography?" David Hockney asks me. "He said photography can never depict heaven or hell." We're talking about Hell at the Fine Art and Antiques Fair in London's Olympia. Hockney recently drove to Spain from his current home in west London - "Those autoroutes are empty. It's fabulous, like driving in Arizona" - and saw Goya's Third of May in the Prado. He noticed that Goya had painted this horrific scene of a mass execution in Madrid in 1808 from a viewpoint no photograph could have achieved.

It adds fuel to his belief that painting can do things photography can't, even when it comes to telling the truth about war. Everyone used to assume photographs of war were "true" in a way photography can't be. But Hockney argues that the digital age has made such a conception of photography obsolete. You can change any image now in any way you want. He once saw what a famous LA photographer's portrait of Elton John looked like before it was retouched. The difference, he says, was "hilarious". And now everyone can do this.

"My sister, who is just a bit older than me, she's a retired district nurse, she's just gone mad with the digital camera and computer - move anything about; she doesn't worry about whether it's authentic or stuff like that - she's just making pictures."

If photography is no longer blunt fact, why not accept that painting has equal status? War photography is as fictional as painting, but painting can express profound insights denied photography. The famous photograph of a Russian soldier placing the red flag over Berlin is an example: "With the man putting the flag on top of the Reichstag - how did the photographer happen to get there first?" wonders Hockney. By contrast, Goya's image of the executions of May 3 1808 has a truth that transcends whether or not he was an eyewitness. Hockney thinks Picasso, when he painted his extremely anti-naturalist Massacres in Korea in the 1950s, was making this very argument against photography: instead of random glimpses of violence, Picasso's painting presents his understanding of the war.

It's funny, talking about war and politics with David Hockney. Gloom and doom was why he left first Bradford, then Britain. "I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s. You didn't know at the time, of course - you didn't know any different."

Hockney talks about his father, in the Bradford accent that has never deserted him after decades of living in Los Angeles and now London. "He was a very eccentric man. He was constantly writing to Stalin - every week. He used to tell us how important these letters were. We didn't think so. We didn't think Stalin would be waiting for them." What were the letters about? "Peace, war. I've given up on all that, I think. I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really. Goya saw that. A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me."

We're talking about Goya's visions of hell, but I'm thinking about a vision of heaven: David Hockney's A Bigger Splash, painted in 1967. In it, the sky is different from the water only in that it is a paler shade of blue. Between the luxuriant nothingness of the pool and the empty, warm sky is a low pink house with a reflecting glass wall, a canvas chair and two palm trees. In the foreground is a yellow diving board, and beyond it, the only motion in this eternally afternoon world, are explosions and curlicues, the aftertrace of a diver.

Hell is not Hockney's subject. Paradise is what his eye has pursued. "I always wanted to be an artist because I like looking - scopophilia, is it called?" he says.

In the 1960s, Hockney did as much as the Beatles to end the British culture of austerity he grew up with, to assert that pleasure matters. The postwar painters were severe chroniclers of ration-book misery. We're here at Olympia to celebrate one of them: Prunella Clough, whose first retrospective since her death in 1999 includes her 1950s realist portraits of workers as well as her later, more playful and sometimes gently lovely abstractions. "It's very good that you're doing this," Hockney tells the exhibition's curator, Angus Stewart, who says Clough was suspicious of people who lived too comfortably. Hockney says that's typical of a lot of British people. "But I'm not like that."

He also remembers, among the leading painters when he came to London, the Scottish duo Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, who "always wore these shiny suits - never wore anything else. They were shiny from never having been off - that kind of shiny." David Hockney wore a shiny jacket to graduate from the Royal College of Art - but this was the other kind of shiny: superstar shiny. It was made out of gold lamé.

Hockney is so famous, so popular, such a great talker and character that it's easy to take him for granted as an artist. If you're a critic, it's tempting to give him a bash. But Hockney is a significant modern painter. He is one of only a handful of 20th-century British artists who added anything to the image bank of the world's imagination. Francis Bacon's screaming popes, Richard Hamilton's Mick Jagger and Damien Hirst's shark are icons of irony, and grimly Hogarthian. Hockney is something very different, a modern Gainsborough, whose eye is entranced by beauty. This is a very radical thing to be.

He was by far the most hedonist of the 1960s pop artists, the only painter who put sex and utopianism at the heart of his decade. He was British art's first pop star. But this was not because he made easy images. His paintings unequivocally praised gay sex - for example, Two Men in a Shower (1963). They were so innocent they disarmed everyone.

Hockney's utopia was America. "I went to New York in the summer of 1961. I thought this is the place, this is it. It ran 24 hours a day for everybody. Here in London everything closed early. I used to complain about that like mad. I don't care now - I go to bed at 11." In his 1961-3 series of prints A Rake's Progress, "The 7-Stone Weakling in America" for the first time visits gay bars until "The Wallet Begins to Empty".

American freedom entranced him a lot more than Swinging London. "Girls in small skirts, it's OK. You know I'm not that bothered about them. I preferred the white socks in California, actually. I did."

Hockney now berates photography and yet, famously, a lot of his art has been made with photography. Like his friend Andy Warhol, he was interested in the world you see through the lens. His series of images of the pursuit and loss of heaven on earth - the swimming pools, Beverly Hills Housewife (1966), Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-1) - are paintings that superficially resemble photographs.

When I look at A Bigger Splash again, I am surprised how much the quotation he dropped on me from the symbolist painter Edvard Munch applies to his own work. Hockney doesn't paint hell, but the heaven on earth, at once blissful and unattainable, that he found in California and mourned in the aftermath of the 1960s is a vision photography could never quite create. A Bigger Splash is a painting about an inner state, an emotional state, somewhere between intoxication and death - it is the perfect invocation of a beauty so powerful it hits you like a wall, so empty it has no solid lines. Blue, pink, white.

Hockney says beauty is the thing none of us can resist. He saw a picture of a Colorado University football player accused of rape and the man's face was so incredibly beautiful, he found it impossible to believe he was guilty. "Human beings always recognise a very beautiful creature, and open the door for them."

The libertarianism of the 1960s is still there in Hockney, and still challenging. When the Guardian commissioned and printed Gillian Wearing's Cilla Black on the cover of G2 last year, which carried the words "Fuck Cilla Black", he "thought it was quite funny. I had no idea Cilla Black was alive or anything." He was amazed that so many letters attacked it. The paper's art critic defended this as a work of art. Fine. Then Hockney read an interview in the Guardian with a man who spent two years in prison for downloading images from the internet. The man claimed he did not think the pictures were wrong, but innocent and beautiful. "This man who, from human curiosity, looking for innocence and beauty, gets some pictures from the internet and does two years in prison for that. Why don't you art critics talk about that?"

This is why he wants to get people thinking about photography - the way we see, and the power of images. "It's time to debate images, especially when someone's going to prison for downloading them."

Photography, with its claim to truth, is a discipline, he thinks, and he's glad digital technology is ending the rule of the one-eyed monster that never lied. "I suppose I never thought the world looked like photographs, really. A lot of people think it does but it's just one little way of seeing it. All religions are about social control. The church, when it had social control, commissioned paintings, which were made using lenses" - as Hockney has argued in his book Secret Knowledge - "and when it stopped commissioning images, its power declined, slowly. Social control today is in the media - and based on photography. The continuum is the mirrors and lenses."

Hockney is an artist who, at his best, broke free of all disciplines, of photography or politics or anything else, to paint his own paradise. He's still looking for enjoyment. He left America because it has become so prissy about smoking and drinking - but he'll go back, he says. He smokes with evident pleasure. "I was born in Bradford in 1937, it was the smokiest place on earth. We all survived - some people might have coughed a bit and fallen over."

Having been so long in America, there's a lot of Europe he hasn't seen. He's just been to Andalusia for the first time. The Spanish, he says - they know how to enjoy themselves.

· Prunella Clough is at the Spring Olympia Fine Art and Antiques Fair, London W12 (020-7923 3188), until March 7.