For nearly seven decades, the stars aligned at Passport Photo Service, a second-floor studio conveniently located among the embassies in London's Grosvenor Square. The owner, David Sharkey, proudly hung the portraits of his celebrity patrons on the wall to prove it. Sitters included many a Tom, Dick and Harry, as well as Burgess Meredith, who played Harry in the 1941 film "Tom, Dick and Harry."
One Saturday in 1987, recalls Philip Sharkey in "Passport Photo Service" (Phaidon, 256 pages, $24.95), a customer expressed disbelief at the gallery of famous faces. "Well, everybody needs a passport," responded a middle-aged woman with thick-rimmed glasses and dimpled cheeks. When the tutting man left, the woman turned to Mr. Sharkey. "I don't think I convinced him," Ava Gardner winked.
Gardner was a repeat customer at Passport Photo Service. Two of her portraits, the first taken in 1976 and the other 11 years later, are featured in "Passport Photo Service," Mr. Sharkey's collection of celebrity passport photos taken in the studio his father founded in 1953. Neither one would immediately call to mind the young femme fatale from "The Killers" (1946), who shot to stardom and stole the heart of Frank Sinatra -- and shattered his good-guy image after he divorced his wife to marry Gardner.
The Ava Gardner of 1987, in her knitted shawl and high-bridge spectacles, seems to carry no sense of mystery. But perhaps that's the point: That we can know so much about the people behind these headshots, because they are celebrities, reminds us that behind every passport photo of a so-called nobody is a whole life and life story.
Equipped with a camera and a promise ("ready in 10 minutes") Passport Photo Service was a go-to for anyone looking for a quick snap to satisfy humorless customs officers. The figures here all look a little awkward, with a slight hunch in their backless chair and their shoulders set at a forced angle. In 1983 Bill Murray took his passport photo in a Hawaiian shirt. In the 1960s J. Paul Getty left no tip. In 2013 Tilda Swinton accidentally forgot her phone in the studio.
Organized loosely alphabetically, "Passport Photo Service" features more than 100 actors, musicians, athletes and even one divorce lawyer who specialized in celebrity cases (see: Marvin Mitchelson in 1983). As an object, the book resembles in both size and style the type of photo wallets that the studio, which closed in 2019, once presented to customers. The subtitle, "An Unexpected Archive of Celebrity Portraits," is stamped on its cover like a travel visa. It's a charming little book rooted in a mundane bureaucratic task.
Mr. Sharkey began working as a photographer at the family business when he was 16, and his firsthand accounts of the appointments give color to these mostly black-and-white portraits. He once had to remind Eric Clapton of recent regulations against smiling for the camera. The guitarist didn't skip a beat: "That suits me, I'm a miserable sod most of the time."