The story of Passport Photo Service, a London studio that photographed hundreds of celebrities for passport photos, is a fascinating one. It's not just about the famous faces, but also about the changing landscape of London and the disappearing small businesses. The studio, founded by a professional boxer-turned-photographer, Dave Sharkey, and passed down to his son, Philip, was a small walk-up shop on Oxford Street that offered no luxury goods, only a set of matchbook-sized portraits printed in ten minutes or less. The studio was known for its speedy service and its wall-to-wall photos of its starry customers before it closed in 2019. The book, published by Phaidon, features more than 300 celebrity portraits from the 1950s to the 2010s. The author, Philip Sharkey, explains that the book is not just about the famous clientele, but also about memorializing a part of London that has rapidly changed. The studio's neighbors included a travel agent, a modeling agency, and a clairvoyant, and the studio itself had been the former workshop of the textile designer William Morris. The author recalls the early days of the studio, when they used card negatives developed in the darkroom, and later moved onto a speedy automatic Kodak Veribrom processor that developed black-and-white prints in just five minutes. By the 1990s, they’d incorporated digital into the process so that customers could see their photos. The author calls the passport photo "the great equalizer" since nearly everyone in the world needs one in order to travel. The studio's house calls were memorable, too — visiting Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s former home to take their portraits "just after they’d put the kids to bed," or trips to recording studios to photograph Sting, George Michael or Eric Clapton. The author continues the studio in this vein, still making portraits as needed for their customer base. The book is a fascinating look at a changing London and the disappearing small businesses, and it's a reminder of the importance of preserving the past as the world changes.
