Meet David Hockney, Anish Kapoor and Jonathan Franzen's favourite photographer

"Yesterday was the big day," says Catherine Opie, as we settle ourselves on a downbeat sofa in a modest photography studio just south of Waterloo Station. "We started with Lynette, then Isaac, then Duro. And ended with Celia."

The American artist, on a quick London trip, had been making portraits of fellow artists: the 2013 Turner Prize nominee Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; film-maker Isaac Julien; fashion designer Duro Olowu; and the ethereal portrait painter Celia Paul (who has a child by Lucian Freud). The results will soon be on show at Thomas Dane’s gallery in London.

These are just the latest additions to Opie’s ongoing series of celebrated creatives that she began five years ago with Laura and Kate Mulleavy, the fashion-designer sisters behind the Rodarte label. The writer Jonathan Franzen and the conceptual artist John Baldessari have been subject to what she calls her "extended stare". After I leave, designer Rick Owens will be passing by, and the day before both Anish Kapoor and Gillian Wearing had been in the chair.

"Her lighting brings an amazing painterly quality," says Wearing. "She captures people in an extraordinary way."  Opie occupies a place in the top tier of fine art photographers, bringing the art-historical language of painters like Velázquez into the present day. She is not, though, a household name.

While the world-famous photographer Annie Leibovitz, for example, roams across the fields of art, editorial and advertising, Opie has never sought to stray near the commercial world. Instead she dedicates herself to exploring particular groups – amateur football players, surfers waiting in silvery mists for elusive waves. She captures cities when they are empty of people and motorways with no cars.

For a "portrait" of Elizabeth Taylor, she moved through the movie star’s home as she lay dying, snapping her bedside table, make-up and perfumes, shoes and jewels. "I couldn’t take her portrait, her image is too big," she says. "But the things that had her imprint, her DNA – like an emery board – I was really touched by."

The pictures that made people take notice in the early 1990s were of a rather different group – sitters came from San Francisco’s leather-bound gay community, in which she played a leading part. Some subjects were in the throes of Aids, others in the complicated process of transitioning across genders. There are piercings and staples and tattoos  – in one, the word DYKE is finely inked in gothic script on the back of a neck beneath closely cropped hair. 

In her own self-portrait, Opie has a bloodied line drawing of a house and two female stick figures holding hands scored into her back. "It was the life I dreamt of, but wasn’t living back then," she says.

Sensual, and throbbing with loss, longing or desire, as well as defining an era and a political sense of choice, they have more than stood the test of time: some were used in the opening credits of the lesbian television series The L Word. The woman who sits here today hasn’t so much mellowed as moved with the times.

She is cheerful, solid and grey-haired, dressed down in jeans and T-shirt. Her entourage is just one assistant, Heather Rasmussen (an artist in her own right), and the pair are staying in a two-bed Airbnb not far away at The Oval. 

Opie is a key figure in LA’s cultural life – she is a professor in the fine art department at UCLA and a board member of the Museum of Modern Art, as well as enjoying her own success. Her current community is the artistic elite, and her work is highly prized and expensive. But Cathy, as everyone calls her, clearly doesn’t have an ego that needs massaging.

Opie denies that in this latest series she’s documenting creative celebrity, simply that this is her milieu. "It’s hard to be a successful artist, so yes, we’re all in the same bubble," she laughs. Her subjects have included her friend the artist Matthew Barney (who recently separated from Bj?rk).

"He was difficult for me," she says. "Just because he’s so pretty to look at, when he’s really a very silent and internal person." She has also photographed David Hockney. "We’re not close, but we respect each other," she says of the octogenarian, whose own portraits of  bohemians such as Ossie Clark helped establish his reputation.

In the portrait, taken in LA in June, Hockney seems to emerge almost imperiously out of Opie’s viscous black background, the colour of his bobbled purple cardigan like a representation of his own off-beat painter’s palette. "It’s important to bear witness, to spend some time," says Opie of the image.

"I love the paint splatters on his trousers and the hearing aid. The bulge of the wallet in the pocket." The frailty of the artist John Baldessari that she summoned in 2013 pays homage to Rembrandt’s Old Man with a Beard, and is enough to move you to tears. 

Opie has always balanced emotion and politics. Jonathan Franzen she approached because she’d read his books and was interested in his place in the history of the great American (white male) novel.

"He’s incredibly gifted with language," she says. "But I have a problem, as with many straight male writers, with the overwrought misogyny of the work. The female characters are angry and bitter. I wonder if when a man writes about a woman like that, it’s about an aspect of the mother; the Disney cliché of the dying mother."

Opie shoots over Franzen’s shoulder and the light falls on the copy of War and Peace he’s reading, a suitable choice for a writer who once called Twitter the "ultimate irresponsible medium". 

Catherine Opie was born in Ohio in 1961. She picked up her first camera at the age of nine, and by 14 had built her own darkroom from scratch, in the new house her family had moved to in San Diego. "I guess I wanted to figure out the world through making images," she says in an accent in which Midwestern vowels still push through the Californian inflection.

She studied fine art in San Francisco, at a time when it was usual to pursue just one medium, in her case photography.  Her sexuality was unquestionable, and late ’80s San Francisco a perfect playground.

She joined the BDSM (bondage dominance sadism masochism) scene, which was as political as it was sexually explorative. "We talked philosophy in those dungeons," she says. "And for me it was a way of coming to terms with my own body."

We talked philosophy in those dungeons. It was a way to come to terms with my body

Naturally butch, she comfortably occupies a fluid space between two genders. "I’ve been called Sir every day of my life," she says. "And it doesn’t bother me one bit. I’m fine with being male and female, though my son always corrects people, 'That’s my mom!'" 

She was, she confesses, delighted to get pregnant at 40, through artificial insemination (she’d taken a job at Yale, and found the procedure was covered by her health insurance). She returned to Los Angeles, gave birth to Oliver and shortly afterwards made a self-portrait of breast-feeding her baby, a genre-defying, tattooed Madonna and child.

"All my butch friends said, 'Why are you getting pregnant, how can you do that?'" she says. "But I’m happy that as a woman I could have a child." 

Michèle Lamy, the elaborately gold-toothed partner of Rick Owens both in business and in life, and a subject of Opie’s, remembers her feeding Oliver at Les Deux Cafes in LA, at the dinner table, in the garden. "She’s larger than life," says Lamy.

"Mesmerising. When I heard she wanted to take my portrait, I was flabbergasted, and so happy."  Opie now describes her life in LA now as "very hermetic". Recently she moved with her partner of 15 years, the painter Julie Burleigh, to a house in the central location of Olympic and Crenshaw. "It’s contemporary by my standards," she says. "Spanish style from 1923, with an Aleppo pine in the back which must be 85 years old."

Previously they had lived in the historic South Los Angeles neighbourhood of West Adams in a 1908 house, "but we needed to move more centrally for Oliver, now he’s in his teens."  By all accounts, she is a doting mother. Oliver, she tells me, is "not your typical LA wheelie boy", but mad about fashion, and currently set on studying constitutional law.

The week after we meet, he is off to Thailand to teach children in a small village, as part of a programme that introduces teenagers to the idea of global citizenship. "I want to raise my kid to care about other people," she says. 

Los Angeles, once a liberating place to be an artist, has changed around them, as large private galleries have arrived, hot-housing a new commercial art scene. And Opie has joined the fray, taking a studio Downtown – once a no-go zone, now the height of fashion. There, her approach is stealthy and silent.

First a chat, then a time for the subject to find themselves. No music. "It’s a quiet, controlling process," she says. "A portrait is never the whole of the subject, it’s about a prolonged gaze on to the sitter." "You have to find yourself, in a comfortable way," says Wearing, who first met Opie in the ’90s. "You have to stop trying to imagine how Cathy will want you." Her overriding objective is to trap time.

"In the age of so many selfies, and the hundreds of images we’re barraged with, I’m saying. 'No, No, No. Spend time with me! Let me hold you for more than two seconds and the flick of a finger across a screen.'" A few years ago, she tells me, she offered her UCLA students a class called "Selfie Slash Self-Portraiture Slash Hash Tag Slash What the F—", then bursts into a satisfied laugh.

"I really made them think about the idea of a self-portrait versus a selfie, and the minutiae of documenting the self through Instagram and Facebook," she says.  In Opie’s hands, photography is an exquisite play of light and form and you would think she could pick any subject she liked. So, to my amazement, as I’m leaving she tells me there are unfulfilled dreams.

The elderly writer Joan Didion, for example, who recently took part in Juergen Teller’s ad campaign for Céline. "I was really jealous when I saw that," sighs Opie. "Juergen took a portrait of the artist Roni Horn, too, who’s always said No. Still it was ah-mazing, that portrait, and I was like, 'Damn You, Juergen!'" and she smiles a broad smile. 

Catherine Opie’s Portraits and Landscapes will be at Thomas Dane Gallery from 3 October until 18 November 2017 thomasdanegallery.com