Ten Years Later, Photographer Finds Old Portrait Shots Are in Deman (Madoff photos)

Ten Years Later, Photographer Finds Old Portrait Shots Are in Demand

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: February 22, 2009
On Oct. 7, 1999, a young photographer named Jonathan Saunders hauled his camera gear across town to the Lipstick Building in Midtown Manhattan for one of his first portrait assignments.

Fortune had selected Mr. Saunders to photograph a middle-aged investor, for an article discussing the investor’s pioneering approach to the markets. “Don’t be on the opposite side of a 100,000-share trade,” the investor said in the accompanying article, “because anyone trading 100,000 shares knows more than you do.”

Ten years later, it turned out it was the investor himself who knew either more, or less, depending on your perspective, than just about anyone in the markets.

The investor was Bernard L. Madoff, and the 80 or so frames that Mr. Saunders took during their 15-minute session a decade ago are suddenly in demand.

“There have been some photo shoots of him, but a lot were very old,” said Robert Priest, the design director of Condé Nast Portfolio, which put an image from Mr. Saunders’s shoot on its March cover. “We felt this one represented Mr. Madoff at his prime.”

Mr. Saunders had largely forgotten about the session when a photo editor from The Wall Street Journal called him in mid-December, asking for a copy of a photo of Mr. Madoff.

“I was like, that’s kind of weird, that’s a 10-year-old portrait I did of a guy I don’t remember, and they were very eager to pay my minimum and get it in the paper,” Mr. Saunders said. “Then, within five or six hours, there was an avalanche of Google news alerts about it, and I was like, oh. I’d better make better scans.”

Photos from the shoot have run in The Journal and The Daily News, and Mr. Saunders is fielding requests from television stations and the international media.

The images from the session are all rather one-note, Mr. Saunders said. “Most of them, he just looks kind of bored. Some he’s looking very serious,” he said. On the trading floor, he did get Mr. Madoff to crack a smile.

But for its cover, Portfolio went with one of Mr. Madoff standing in a hallway, looking serene and self-assured.

“The people who invested with him seemed to be completely confident in his management of the money,” Mr. Priest said. “I think that expression shows there. He seems like a very strong personality, and yet with warm eyes. This expression sort of said what those people saw in him.” STEPHANIE CLIFFORD