When I was very young, just at the beginning of the career journey that brought me to the world of fashion, I had an Irving Penn experience, which, for the first time in a while, I thought of this last week when I heard of the photographer’s death at 92.

An April 1950 Vogue cover by Irving Penn

I use the word “experience” because I can’t remember if I ever formally met Penn. I was, rather, in his vicinity. I was in my twenties, in Paris, doing a story for American Vogue about a make-up artist. Penn, who was then in his seventies, was photographing the model Shalom Harlow for the magazine and the make-up artist was also working on the shoot. So I was in a corner, observing.

What I remember is quiet, and stillness. Phyllis Posnick, the fashion editor on the shoot, told me Penn liked Harlow because she had been a dancer and was, therefore, very good at “holding a pose” for many long minutes on end. Unlike Richard Avedon, another glossy magazine photographer whose work blurred the boundaries between fashion and art and who had a penchant for running and jumping models, Penn’s pictures were not action sequences, but still-lifes with women (or without women, or with African tribesmen, as the case might be). They were perfectly, pristinely, imagined and arranged – the representation of a mind’s eye. Occasionally, Penn might instruct Harlow to move, ever so slightly; to raise her arm or turn to the left. She would begin to shift in almost invisible increments, as gradual as a stop-motion film. And then she would freeze. Again. It went on for hours. And it went on like that often.

The model Lisa Fonssagrives, who married Irving Penn, in ‘Woman with Roses on her Arm’ (1950)

For as long as I was writing beauty stories for Vogue, I would hope that Penn would do the picture illustrating the pieces I was working on. That was partly because the picture would be unexpected (overripe bananas for a piece on ageing) and it would be beautiful, but mostly it was because I knew that, if Penn took the picture, chances were high that the story would go in the main part of the magazine and not the beauty section at the front – that it would become Important. This may seem childish and selfish in the extreme (it was), but it was also formative, because for a writer, especially a writer starting out in a world that many smart people thought supremely silly, Penn’s photographs were primers in how not to condescend.

For Penn’s pictures took an object, often a very banal object, such as foundation, and, by seeing it as its elements (form, colour, light and shadow), elevated it to something entirely other. To Penn, a woman such as his wife, the model Lisa Fonssagrives, was a shape, and so was Pablo Picasso, and so were the Clinique products whose ad campaigns he created, and all of them deserved to be special.

“Photographing a cake can be art,” he said in 1953. More than half a century later, the lesson still holds. In everything, there is the possibility of nobility, if given the right regard.

Vanessa Friedman is the FT’s fashion editor