'As much as it can be very beautiful, a handbag in itself is just a handbag,' says Juergen Teller. 'What makes it interesting is if a woman walks around with it. That's what life's about.'

It's an irreverent observation, but it's typical of Teller. One of the world's best-respected fashion photographers, he's wary of being 'clamped down by commercial restraints' on magazines and refuses to shoot 'clean cut, money-driven advertising shoots where I just sell product'.

Instead he works with left-field magazines such as W and designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang and Comme des Garcons, who give him complete creative freedom. 'I work with designers who are masters of their own universe,' he says. 'It's not like working with some big company with a CEO, an art director and God knows who else. I only answer to one person, and they have a very clear reason why they chose me so they trust me.'

Marc Jacobs

His most fruitful partnership to date, and the one that's rewritten the rulebook for creative advertising, is with Marc Jacobs. It's lasted 11 years and 52 campaigns so far, which have now been gathered together by Steidl into a book. Jacobs and Teller were friends long before they started working together, meeting through Teller's then-partner (and early collaborator), stylist Venetia Scott. They got talking 'about art and music, this and that', and when Sonic Youth guitarist Kim Gordon started wearing Marc Jacobs on tour, it seemed natural for Teller to shoot her. The result was his first Marc Jacobs ad. 'It's the only photograph I've done (with Marc) where I wasn't 100% in control, because she was on stage and I couldn't say, "Hang on a minute, hold your guitar a little further down",' says Teller. 'I just went and did it.'

Then an opportunity came along to shoot Sophia Coppola, swiftly followed by Claudia Schiffer, and the collaboration went from there. 'At the beginning it came very fluidly and easily because we had all these friends we wanted to shoot, then after a few years we ran out of friends,' Teller laughs. 'Then it became more complex and we started exploring different scenarios of who we'd like to work with. We always start with a very open discussion.

'Sometimes I suggest someone, sometimes he suggests someone, but if I'm not sure he always says, "Well, if you can't see it, you can't photograph it". We have enough common ground to make it exciting, and after that it's down to me. The way it looks, the typeface, everything. He gives me very nice control.'

Over the years Teller's shot Charlotte Rampling, Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston and Victoria Beckham, among others, but it's fair to say that the subjects are all celebrities, and the ads always state who they are. But Teller says he and Jacobs aren't motivated by the cache of celebrity, arguing they use artists, directors and musicians because they're interested in what people do, not what they look like.

'I'm not thinking "Oh my God they're so famous",' he says. 'That's not the point. Everyone's just normal human beings. Old, young, ugly, beautiful, I'm interested in everyone, not just generic 18-year-old girls. William (Eggleston), is an iconic figure, and of course it gives me power to get him in because he wouldn't do it for anyone else, but I also think he looks fantastic and love his work. The captions are partly to personalise the story but also because often people were doing us favours. Giving them a credit was just like giving something back.'

Sly humour

Teller certainly treats everyone equally irreverently, playing on Kate Moss' rock chick fantasies and cropping Coppola almost entirely out of frame to focus on a squirrel. His shots of Victoria Beckham skit her relentless self-promotion, depicting her as a product in a giant shopping bag, but he probably went furthest with Charlotte Rampling, a personal friend, who he asked permission to fondle. Rampling smoked a long cigarillo before agreeing.

'It's really exciting what you can get people to do,' says Teller. 'Imagine you're going to a barbeque, everyone sits around eating their sausages and having a very nice time. Nobody does anything weird, right? But in photographs you can make people do something really amazing. It's a little bit like going to a kids' party, every one suddenly does stupid things. It's fun being open, not being in this restrictive everyday world where you can't do anything and everything has to be politically correct. But I wouldn't ask someone to do something totally inappropriate, just what fits into the parameters of their personality. Victoria Beckham was in on the joke, she thought it was really funny.'

When he worked with Cindy Sherman he decided to shoot her interacting with someone else because she's so often alone in her own work, but he rejected the idea of hiring an actor on the grounds it would add another layer into her play on identity. Gradually it dawned on him he should be the other character in the shot, and the pair of them used Jacobs' clothes to often hilarious effect.

Fine art

The images testify to Jacobs' open-minded willingness to ridicule his own clothes, but they also - like the shots of Charlotte Rampling - tap into Teller's interest in self-portraiture. 'Photographing myself is the best thing I've ever done,' he says. 'I realised how far you can push things. There's no discussion about "Oh it's a little bit cold outside" [when you're photographing yourself]. It really doesn't matter.

The Sherman and Rampling shoots both evolved into personal projects, and are also published as monographs by Steidl. In fact Teller is a successful contemporary artist but while he accepts there's a big difference between presenting an image as an ad and displaying it as fine art, he has no preference. 'Seeing a photograph in a gallery or seeing it in a magazine on a bus are very different things but they're both interesting,' he says. 'There's no hierarchy. I take a gallery show in New York equally seriously as the next Marc Jacobs campaign. It's not like there's just a bit of money making on the side that I'm just going to whack out. It's all about doing good work, that's the important thing.'

In print

Marc Jacobs Advertising 1998-2009 by Juergen Teller is published by Steidl (ISBN: 978-3-86521-715-8), priced £78. Juergen Teller goes on show at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, on 10 September.