I realise, with hindsight, that when I began the tedious squabble with the assistants crowded around the high-profile editorial photographer Mark Seliger – How much time can we have with him? Forty seconds? Five days? – that this was a vital primer for what was to follow. For, when you visit Planet Celebrity, like an incoming astronaut you have to pass through the fiery atmosphere first. Once you are there, time will bend, the natives will have incomprehensible motives, and everything will just be about “where you’re at”.

I was visiting Seliger at his studio on the outskirts of Greenwich Village in New York because here, in 1997, in a corner of the mid-19th-century warehouse-cum-stable that he had then acquired, he had discovered a lift shaft that seemed to have some possibilities. “I didn’t need a horse elevator,” he said, quite reasonably. So he tore it out and created a stairwell. He left the exposed brickwork, some fittings, such as the rusty ladder and the girder that jackknifes across the space, and he let in beautifully diffused light through windows that have yellowed with rust stains.

He came to be fond of the space and began to invite celebrities who had arrived for photo shoots in the studio downstairs to step into the stairwell for another, more soulful, shot. Then he started inviting people there specially. “I asked people whom I’d always wanted to photograph,” he said. “I asked Bill Irwin first – he’s one of the last vaudevillians.”

Irwin came in February 2002 and posed hanging from the ladder with a bendy elegance. Then came the naked back of the supermodel Heidi Klum (“it was almost this idea of the body as a container, a kind of X-ray”), then the composer Philip Glass (seated at a miniature piano like a clumsy giant), then Ralph Lauren and David Bryne. Over the next few years Seliger shot all kinds in his stairwell, from Mick Jagger to the Right Rev Desmond Tutu.

Some brought props (“I thought it would be kind of interesting to do Jeff Koons with a mask on, but he said: ‘That’s not really where I’m at right now. How about if I have a blow-up lobster?’ ”). But many just came as they were, ready to be photographed by one of the best in the business under the same simple conditions.

Michael J. Fox posed as a boxer with Muhammad Ali: “They both have Parkinson’s,” Seliger said, “and my Dad had Parkinson’s. I’d worked with Michael for years and I’d never photographed Ali. I wanted them to share a stage – you know, the idea of putting up a good fight.”

In rather different circumstances, Johnny Knoxville, of Jackass, came and was shot while hanging from hooks attached to his chest (he also threw up several times, having been out past his bedtime). And Giorgio Armani visited: “A lot of the restrictions had to do with time,” Seliger said. “Giorgio Armani had only 12 minutes and, really, it was the most lovely 12 minutes I’ve ever spent with anyone.” Finally, when he felt he was done, Seliger gathered the prints all together in a book. This week he opens an exhibition of them at the Richard Goodall Gallery in Manchester.

It was inspired by the stairwell, of course, but also in part by Seliger’s medium. “We started producing platinum palladium prints,” he said. “It’s a beautiful turn-of-the-century process where you make your own paper. You take actual metal and developers’ contrast agents, and you make an emulsion and paint it on to watercolour paper. Then you make a contact print of the enlarged negative and expose it to an ultraviolet light. It has a particular sensitivity in terms of bringing out an exaggerated greyscale.”

Simple, really. And that was the point, for Seliger’s usual style is all fuelled up and fabulously baroque. He has posed Chris Rock with his head in an aquarium; Bill Murray singing into the trunk of an elephant; and Drew Barrymore as a dissolute Alice in Wonderland blowing smoke-rings. Indeed, the beauty of Planet Seliger is that it is a wonderland of bottomless budgets, beach locations and Alist stars.

Born in Houston, Texas, in 1959, Seliger began his ascent working for Rolling Stone. He still has something of the rocker in him, and even heads up a decent country rock band called Rusty Truck. He can melt into sweet camp at times, but his complexion speaks of many nights of hard fun, and maybe it was this devotion to the lifestyle that won him a contract with Condé Nast in 2001.

Since then he’s been a regular among the jet-set demimonde, and the day I visited him seemed like any other: as we sat by his rooftop Jacuzzi, Minnie Driver showed up to be poured into various outfits for the next shoot. She poked her head out of the window at one point and asked what the plan was. “It’s just all about where you’re at with your music,” Seliger assured her, as if he barely knew what she was there for. “Oh, right,” she said, “that’ll be in my pyjamas, then.”

I began to wonder whether this pose of negligent disarray might be Seliger’s genius – that while assistants might indeed be clock-watching and quality-controlling, the man himself gives you the impression that all is well and we can do, well, just whatever. Of course, that can change if the personalities don’t behave themselves. “Mikhail Baryshnikov was a little problematic at first,” he said, “because he didn’t want it to be dance – he wanted it to be a little more, as he called it, ‘lifestyle’. But eventually he figured out what he wanted to do.” This was dance – which, conveniently, was what Seliger wanted.

Yet even in explaining decisions already made, Seliger sometimes talks as if he just tossed a coin. “I don’t try to get too intellectual about the way things are going,” he said. “I just say this is what I’m doing right now and I grab a camera.”

In 2005 Seliger made the papers when Vanity Fair published an article about the infighting on the set of a shoot he did involving the stars of Desperate Housewives.

According to the writer, Marcia Cross, who plays Bree, “lost it” when Teri Hatcher (Susan) was moved to the centre of the shot. Hatcher’s selection of a red swimsuit also proved vexatious. Publicists and personal assistants descended, and tempers further frayed. The story revealed just how vapid and overblown modern celebrity had become.

At the time Seliger said: “A lot of times you’re unaware of the side stuff. You’re working with incredible time restraints. The great thing is that for the most part people leave me alone. That’s a lovely thing, but it took years to establish.”

I wondered whether the stairwell pictures were designed to get closer to the soul of the star? He wouldn’t say; instead he just said something strangely random that suggested that his pictures were little more than flash cards.

“Well, we’re so used to the power of celebrity now - being a mass of pop-culture whores! – that we know what people look like, we just want to see their faces. It’s not about the great experience of a photograph any more.”

Even when I asked him about the roster of sitters, his rationales seemed to flip-flop. “A lot of these people you would never get to know if you weren’t in the hub,” he said. Yet earlier he had said: “I saw this interesting documentation of people in pop culture who were maybe not mainstream, maybe peripheral, less out in the limelight . . . ” (If anyone sees Mick Jagger, please tell him he’s peripheral.)

Eventually, I realised that it was fruitless to grill Seliger on his motives. His genius is in his intuition and his charm, which are probably as inscrutable to him as they are to anyone else. As he says himself, it’s all a bit mysterious. “Life is short and a lot of these people are, you know, they’re in their . . . they’re kind of like . . . either their prime or . . . there are moments when you never know what’s going to happen.” Does it work? It just depends, I guess, where you’re at.

— Mark Seliger: In My Stairwell is at Richard Goodall Gallery, 103 High Street, Manchester (0161-834 3330), from Oct 25 to Nov 24

Mapplethorpe movie

The personal and professional relationship between the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the curator and collector Sam Wagstaff is the subject of Black White + Gray, showing at The Times BFI London Film Festival on Sun, at 6.30pm, at NFT3, and Oct 24, at 9pm, at the NFT Studio (020-7928 3232; timesonline.co.uk/lff)

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