In a photo studio on Oxford Street in London, near the American Embassy, David Sharkey did the impossible: He created hundreds of flattering passport photos. The studio, which was open from 1953 to 2019, attracted some of the biggest names of the era in search of a 10-minute turnaround and stylish headshots for passports and visas. Philip Sharkey, Dave’s son and former employee, has gathered more than 300 of these in PASSPORT PHOTO SERVICE: An Unexpected Archive of Celebrity Portraits (Phaidon, $24.95), complete with a blue leatherette cover designed to look like the floppy wallet that enclosed these small prints.
Personalities come through in each wallet-size photo, taken against the studio’s blank white screen. There’s Marty Feldman looking chic in a turtleneck and ankh necklace in 1969; David Hockney in his round glasses, first in 1965 and then in 1970; Ava Gardner wearing various scarves in 1976 and 1987. Muhammad Ali came into the studio in June of 1974 on his way to fight George Foreman in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), and signed extra copies of his passport photo for his fellow customers in line.
It is intriguing to see those figures who came in multiple times age: Both Dudley Moore (1967, 1975) and Sean Connery (1977, 1989) return with significantly more facial hair than they had the previous decade, though with just as much swagger. Joan Collins came in three times between 1971 and 1988. “Perhaps unsurprisingly,” Philip Sharkey writes, “she knew exactly how she wanted to be posed: on a very slight angle to the left.”
In 1997, Kate Winslet sat for a passport photo not for herself, but for Julia, the character she played in the 1998 movie “Hideous Kinky,” who travels from England to Morocco in 1972.
While getting passport photos can be an annoying chore, this collection of familiar faces is a delight.
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