Photographer Platon Closes—Soho Co-op Goes for $1.77 M.

Every time a big-ticket, two-level Soho apartment sells to a bona fide artist, as opposed to a madras-wearing Wall Street trader or goateed media executive, the neighborhood gets a little less sleazy.

So, mercifully, the magazine photographer Platon Antoniou (who professionally goes by his first name alone) and his wife Rebecca, an illustrator, bought the apartment they’d been renting at 16 Greene Street earlier this month. According to city records, they paid $1,775,500.

Platon takes very bright, very pointed, very close and often very wide-angled portraits: His December 2000 Esquire cover shot of a smiley Bill Clinton with his legs open is beaten only by his April 2005 Time cover shot of knife-legged Ann Coulter on a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair.

He’s also shot Pacino and Beckham and Iraq soldiers and Neil Young (plus, less eminently, this reporter, too).

His producer, Mary-Clancey Pace, who works up the block, said that Platon is traveling. But she knows his new place: “He’s been there forever,” she said. He had been renting, she estimated, for around five years.

Is his co-op photogenic? “It’s very lofty, I guess is the word I would use …. He has all of his working space in there; it’s very nice.” That downstairs photography setup includes a darkroom, and there’s a lofted living space above.

“It’s very modern,” Ms. Pace said. “It’s very clean, well-lit.” Hemingway would be proud!

The Soho cast-iron specialist Samuel A. Warner built Platon’s building in 1880. According to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Mr. Warner’s stylishness, unlike the photographer’s, “ranged from the Italian palazzo to Romanesque Revival.”