Photographer, filmmaker, artist, chef, musician, poet, philosopher, hippie; Mark Borthwick could be called all of these things, but the more labels you pin on him, the further you get from who he is. It's true, for example, that Borthwick was a fashion photographer, and he does still shoot fashion photographs. He made his name in the 1990s by challenging the standard of slick fashion imagery, collaborating with labels like Maison Martin Margiela and Comme des Garçons, and publishing stories in magazines like Purple, i‑D, Self Service and Italian Vogue.

But as the title of his new Rizzoli book, "not in fashion", implies, Borthwick never really was a fashion photographer as you and I might think of one. There is nothing retouched or over-produced about his photographs; the closest he comes to manipulating an image is opening the back of his Leica M6 to let light leak in, a practiced surrender of control. Released in late March, the book was meant to be a retrospective of Borthwick's influential 1990s fashion work. It is that, and yet it also makes clear that Borthwick's personal and fashion work were never really separate at all. Although many of the images in the book appeared in fashion editorials or ads for designers, Borthwick was just shooting how he and an ever-expanding band of friends and collaborators dressed and styled themselves—and indeed how they chose to live and create art.

"The cool thing about Mark is that his fashion photos and his personal, family photos all look the same," says Martynka Wawrzyniak, a photographer and freelance editor for Rizzoli who urged Borthwick to do the book. "When we were editing, I had to keep asking, 'Is this a fashion image? We've gotta remember to make this about fashion.' And he would say, 'Well, it makes no difference.'"

London born and raised, Borthwick never planned a career in photography. At 17 he was a part of the early 1980s New Romantic movement, characterized by its glamorous dress and elaborate makeup, that arose after punk's heyday. Borthwick lived in an apartment with several friends, and they would wake up, do their makeup and "escapade around in the streets of London, King's Road," he says. Through the scene, he met musicians and began doing their makeup for photo shoots, where he in turn met photographers, some of whom worked in fashion and invited him to participate in their shoots. He "slowly slipped into the fashion world," he says.

At 24 he moved to Paris and began to DJ at a club a couple of nights a week, immersing himself in the city's nightlife. He found that, after a "heavy night out," walking through parks like the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Tuileries was a fine way to spend a day. He started taking some of his first pictures there. "My interest lay in photographing people just sitting around the parks," he says, "I'd go chat up the grannies and just talk to people."

Friends who saw his pictures suggested he pursue his interest further, pointing out that his images were unlike anything that existed in fashion at the time. "Fashion was something that was much more controlled and the image was about something that wasn't existing in the normal, ordinary day-to-day life," he says. "I realized, at the time, that my interest was very much attached to the ordinary, and then through that friends said, 'Hey, let's do a fashion shoot.'" Borthwick published his first fashion story in The Face.

"I was always far more aware of fashion existing in the normal," Borthwick tells me. We're sipping Oolong tea and sitting on wooden lounge chairs in the Brooklyn townhouse he and his wife of 22 years, fashion designer Maria Cornejo, own. The early afternoon sun warms the room through the floor-to-ceiling windows that look onto the backyard. A week's worth of newspapers are stacked neatly on the hardwood floor, and tacked to one white wall is an artful mixture of images, drawings and texts, giving me the sense I've walked into and sat down in one of Borthwick's handmade books, which "not in fashion" was designed to conjure. His 11-year-old son Joey is there too, interjecting occasionally, tinkering with various cameras and lenses he and his father have been experimenting with throughout the morning.

Borthwick says that while taking photos in Paris's parks, he found more than just a peaceful environment. He also found a purpose for his photos at a time when "there was an aspect of me wanting to run away from the reality of the way that most people lead their lives." He wanted, he says, "to project this idea that life should be taken by the hand, it should lead you instead of [you] trying to control it. Taking time by the hand and giving yourself the opportunity to do nothing is actually more beneficial than waking up every day and having an agenda and all this stuff to do," he recalls. "I think that that's what interested me most as a photographer. You realized that not only could you spend your day taking these pictures and living that life yourself, but you could also create the opportunity to share that, and then hopefully inspire others to take that leap and to spend their life in a similar way."

When he photographed clothes, he continued to take images that were often observed rather than staged, in which the natural world and his use of available light created a sense of fashion being lived, rather than constructed for consumption. He also looked for new ways to consider clothing design and the way people dress. "I've always been very interested, not in fashion, but in the craftsmanship that goes into clothing," Borthwick says. "I've had a very curious eye for and love for the work that goes into making clothing."

In one of his photographs, Borthwick's model faces a graffiti-tagged cement wall. She is presumably wearing the clothes she showed up in: sneakers, loose-fitting black pants and a black tank top. The designer clothes she might have posed in are taped to the wall beside her like a collection of ideas. In a series of images Borthwick shot for Italian Vogue, he photographed his model, "Stella," in the act of taking off a black gown, and then standing the garment up against a wall. In the final frame, the gown stands alone, upright, supported by its lacework construction. In a photograph published in 1993 in Purple, Borthwick takes a profile view of his model, "Helen," who is kneeling in her undergarments in the act of dropping a dress on the floor.

In the 1990s, Borthwick found many venues open to his pursuits. "When I was working as a young photographer," he says, "there were magazines like Purple that would give me 20- to 30-page stories where I could communicate another sense of what could become a fashion image."

In 1998, after establishing himself as one of the more influential voices in fashion photography, Borthwick decided to stop working in the industry. He and Cornejo had just moved to New York; she was pregnant with their son, Joey, and their daughter, Bibi, was six. Cornejo's father was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she had gone to England to be with him. Borthwick was also working on his first book projects. He chose to concentrate on his family and his books and not take any commercial or editorial work. "At the time I had been working a lot, so I could afford to do that."

Six months after his first book—Synthetic Voices, which won an Art Director's Club award for design in 1998—was released, he began getting high-end advertising work. "I started doing computers, cars, banks and everything outside of fashion." Borthwick, who was repped by PMI (Photographic Management, Inc.) at the time (he has been with MS Logan, his current agent, for three years) appreciated the commercial work because he "was in a position where I could collaborate in a very true sense. I had the opportunity to work with great agencies like Wieden + Kennedy," he says, "They would book me for jobs either for something I had done that they wanted me to replicate, or something that had existed in my work that had inspired the shoot. They came to me excited for what I did," he says, "it wasn't for anything else." This was in sharp contrast to what he experienced as a fashion photographer.

He felt the fashion industry was no longer in sync with his intuitive experimentation. "There was a certain point where most fashion magazines disagreed with the way that I was working," he recalls, "But I didn't want to believe I was in a position where there was this hierarchy of fashion editors saying you can't do this, it has to be like that."

Borthwick found that a quiet life was far more favorable to him. "I remember being successful as a young fashion photographer, and there were many reasons for stopping work in the fashion industry, but one of the main reasons was just the attention that was paid to you," he tells me. "There's this certain sense of loss, you become this kind of trendy young fella, and I really didn't want to participate in being that fella, there was just no interest, and maybe I didn't want to give myself the courage to be that person or play that role."

His new advertising work afforded him the chance to pursue other projects. He continued to make personal images, but he also explored writing prose and poetry, drawing and playing music. He collaborated on a DVD with the musician Cat Power in 2004, and he has shown his work internationally in galleries and museums.

Borthwick had never considered creating a survey of his fashion photography on the scale of the Rizzoli volume. Then, in 2006, he met Wawrzyniak during a show of his art projects at Journal Gallery—then in Manhattan's East Village—and the retrospective book grew from there.

For the first time, the kinetic, onward-looking Borthwick had to stop and archive his photographs. He discovered threads within his work that he never knew were there. "I was amazed that I was taking the same photographs 20 years ago that I am today," he says.

In "not in fashion", Borthwick included an image of the friends he and his family have stayed with in upstate New York for several years. In a photograph of "Tilda" (Swinton), taken on the set of the film Thumbsucker in 2003, we see her sitting on a large boulder in a forest. Borthwick's daughter and son appear in several photographs. There are images of trees and lakes and a lemon tree, all awash in light Borthwick allowed to leak across the negatives. A group of friends spend an afternoon in a sunny backyard, socializing and playing music. Three women sit with their dog at a lakeside. Children play at the beach or ride on the shoulders of an adult. Bjork cups her hands around her mouth as if preparing to yell.

Are these fashion images? Probably not as far as a mainstream magazine like Vogue might ever be concerned.

"Maybe it was less about what fashion was about than just the way that we're living and the way that we dress," Borthwick says of his work. "I'm entertained by what dress is and dress codes. . . clothing is such a beautiful part of one's soul, it's such a beautiful thing to share."

A black-and-white image of Borthwick and his family with a group of friends appears on one of the book's opening pages. The caption reads "tis eye, Will Shine." When I ask, Borthwick smiles and says he came up with the name while creating a book of poetry, and then began to use the nom de plume as a band name. It was "just a feeling" when he first wrote it down, he says, but the name shows up throughout "not in fashion". "Will Shine was just a synonym for not wanting to participate too much with myself and the image of being a fashion photographer or a photographer," Borthwick says.

The book also includes his poetry and a number of pages from his journals, which are filled with writing and drawings, as well as tests and other photographs, providing a unique look at Borthwick's particular creative process and furthering the sense that Mark Borthwick the fashion photographer doesn't exist without Borthwick the artist, the chef, the filmmaker, the musician, the poet, the philosopher.

"There's this word participation," Borthwick says. "And to participate with the self, and to participate with what you could become or what other people might envision you to be, I try not to play that role; I'm doing too many things."

With the release of "not in fashion", gallery shows in New York, Paris and Japan, and further books of his personal work planned, the level of attention Borthwick is receiving for his photography is again on the rise. He is being asked to do more fashion work, and he recently shot a holiday catalogue for Barney's. But, Borthwick says, he will shoot fashion the way he always has. "I have no interest in working with models or working with anybody but my friends."

At this point Joey pipes up: He wouldn't mind if his dad worked with a few models here and there.