Madoff's Apartment: The Difference That Photos Make

• September 18th 2009

by Mark Wellborn

It’s very fitting that there are two sets of photos of Bernie Madoff’s Upper East Side penthouse, one set making the home look much more attractive than it actually is. The Wall Street Journal had an interesting piece yesterday that looks at how one photographer’s work portrays the home versus another.

Madoff’s former home on 64th Street in Manhattan was put on the market last week for $9.9 million in order to help pay back the investors that he duped for decades. The first outlet let in to take photos was the Associated Press that was supposed to “show how the Madoffs lived.”

After a competition among the top brokerages in Manhattan, Sotheby’s International Realty was chosen to list the property. The brokerage took its own photos, “featuring light-filled windows and warm peach-toned walls in the living room, glowing ceilings in the library and fresh flowers on all the coffee tables.”

Obviously professional photos make homes on the market look more attractive than photos taken with a normal digital camera (we wrote about this issue a few months ago). However, in the case of the Madoff penthouse, it is particularly symbolic to see two markedly different sets given that the man himself specialized in creating two very different sets of financial statements for his clients.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/madoffs_apartment_the_difference_that_photos_make/1329.