German photographer Juergen Teller employs ruthless self-analysis in his film of himself watching the World Cup Final between Germany and Brazil, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic.

To feature as the exclusive performer in your own feature-length video film may sound like an exercise in egoism that would make Narcissus blush, but German photographer Juergen Teller does just that in World Cup Final, Germany v Brazil, 0-2. The film features in Temple Bar's Outdoor programme from next week. There is certainly a degree of narcissistic self-absorption involved in Teller's exercise, as in all his recent work, but his gamble is that there is also an element of ruthless self-analysis.

For the 90 minutes plus of the 2002 World Cup Final between Germany and Brazil, he settled himself on the sofa and recorded his reactions to the game on video. He shouts, he swears, he jumps up and down, he works himself into states of fury and despair, coming across as a caricature of The Angry Male, full of aggression and despair. It is, he has said with perhaps a touch of hyperbole, "The most disturbing thing I have ever seen".

Teller made his reputation as an unorthodox fashion and portrait photographer for London style magazines in the late 1980s.

He was born in Erlangen in southern Germany in 1964 and grew up in a village setting that is vividly and uncomfortably recorded in his Citibank prize-winning book Marchenstuberl - which translates as something like "fairytale den". In his images, the Bavarian fairytale setting of the immense forest is jarringly counterpointed with the ugly utilitarianism of tacky modernity, and the oppressive claustrophobia of close-knit family life.

When his brief apprenticeship to the family business - making bows and bridges for violins - was curtailed because he developed an allergy to the materials employed, he may well have been allergic to more than wood and glue.

As his work makes abundantly clear, he has some major father issues. By his own account he stumbled onto photography by chance, out of boredom, when he picked up his cousin's camera and looked through the viewfinder. In any event, he went on to study photography in Munich and moved to London in search of work in 1986.

There he met the woman who became his partner and frequent collaborator until last year, the stylist Venetia Scott, and his career took off.

His edgy work with such models as Kate Moss, Stephanie Seymour and Kristen McMenamy helped usher in an era of what has been variously termed dirty realist, grunge, heroin-chic or anti-fashion fashion photography.

He became so friendly with one of his portrait subjects, Charlotte Rampling, that she seems to have become something of a muse for him. The raw, consciously unglamorous nature of his images didn't deter heavy-duty clients from enlisting him for ad campaigns. After all, street cred is in itself a distinctly desirable commodity, for fashion designers and celebrities alike.

Go-Sees, the other film in Temple Bar's Teller season, is a personal project that is in large measure an ambivalent reflection on the fashion industry. A "go-see" is when a model is sent to a photographer without a specific job in mind, just so the face will register and be borne in mind. Over a year Teller recorded every "go-see" who turned up on the doorstep of his London studio. The images were gathered together in a book and then, latterly, Teller felt he'd like to make it the basis for a film. The project has been described as a critique of the fashion world, but it's not exactly that. Teller's interest seems to be in the nature of the encounter, the way the expectations invested in it reflect other, wider aspects of life.

His success as a fashion photographer meant he could scale down his fashion work, and a significant amount of his time and his energy have been directed into a multi-faceted autobiographical project for some time now. Two years after he'd moved to London his father took his own life. Coinciding with the screening of his films in Temple Bar, the Goethe Institut's Return Gallery is showing a large-scale digital print of his startling black-and-white self-portrait photograph Father and Son. Like World Cup Final, it is one of a series of intense, sometimes lacerating self-portrait images produced by him last year.

His father was a moody alcoholic, emotionally remote from his son. Father and Son could be read as an aggressively oedipal image. In it, a naked Teller poses triumphantly - and theatrically - over his father's grave at midnight, cigarette in hand, beer bottle raised to his mouth, one raised foot resting on a soccer ball (his father hated football). Despite some classical references, there is a harsh, slightly grubby awkwardness to the image that is characteristic of Teller's photography overall.

His career path and his work parallel those of his contemporary and compatriot Wolfgang Tillmans, the difference perhaps being that the autobiographical element has been central to the latter from the beginning. Tillmans never recognised any boundary between personal and commercial work.

Photographs of episodes in the lives of his friends regularly turned up in issues of i-D magazine. But, as with the work of the enormously influential Nan Goldin, what featured in the pictures was what was normally excluded: the oblique, the obscure, the transgressive, the random. The spaces in between, snapshots of people doing nothing much, caught off guard. Casual moments are captured in an apparently casual style.

What Teller and Tillmans and other like-minded photographers have in common is an impatience with the inherited formality of photographic language. By the time Teller came to it, fashion photography had reached a level of polish, technical sophistication and correctness that was ultimately restrictive, even given the way certain photographers - such as Helmut Newton, David Bailey or, further back, Will McBride - pushed the acceptable limits of the language in various ways.

The talents of many highly-regarded photographers have been nurtured in the hothouse of fashion for more than half a century. Fashion photographers have consistently tended to cross over into other areas, and have often, no matter how successful, become cynical and dismissive about the business.

But it's not just about fashion. It could be that what is really at stake is the search for what John Berger termed "another way of telling".

In his collaborations with photographer Jean Mohr, he tried to devise a flexible, honest alternative to conventional modes of documentary representation. Teller and Tillmans are trying to do very much the same thing. Both, with their jarring, off-centre views of a troubling reality, produce work that declines to fit obligingly into preconceived narrative and pictorial formulae. In their efforts to rediscover qualities of truthfulness and immediacy in photography, they have clearly touched a chord.

World Cup Final, Germany v Brazil, 0-2 (97mins) runs in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, 8 p.m.-11 p.m., Tues-Sat, January 13th-17th, January 27th-February 3rd; Go-Sees (27mins) Tues-Sat, 8 p.m.-11 p.m., January 20th- 24th; Father and Son can be seen at The Return, Goethe Institut, 37 Merrion Square, where Juergen Teller will discuss his work with critic Seán O'Hagan at 3 p.m., January 13th, booking for the discussion is essential. Contact Sandra Curran at 01-6772255.