For more than six decades it was an intimate celebrity hotspot — a small walk-up shop on London’s Oxford Street that offered no luxury goods, only a set of matchbook-sized portraits printed in ten minutes or less.
The family-owned business Passport Photo Service was known for its speedy service and its wall-to-wall photos of its starry customers before it closed in 2019. Founded by a professional boxer-turned-photographer, Dave Sharkey, and passed down to his son, Philip, the Sharkey family and their staff took photographs for passports, visas and green cards of famous and non-famous faces alike.
But thanks to their well-positioned studio near a cluster of embassies, fast service, and willingness to make house calls, some 800 celebrities sat in front of their cameras, including Muhammad Ali, Madonna, Chaka Khan, Bill Murray, Stella McCartney, Katy Perry, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tilda Swinton.
Until now, the archive had never been seen before — except for those who walked into the shop. But after it closed down, in part due to the relocation of the US embassy, among other factors, Philip Sharkey returned to an idea that his friends and family had often suggested: he should make a book.
“Passport Photo Service,” published by Phaidon, features more than 300 hundred celebrity portraits from the 1950s to the 2010s. Sharkey explained by phone that though he knows their famous clientele are the draw, it’s also a book that memorializes a part of London that has rapidly changed, as development on Oxford Street, the city’s busiest artery for high-end shopping, has left little room for small businesses.
“It’s a disappearing London,” Sharkey said in a phone call. “When you could open a little business up the stairs and have a little 500-square-foot office. It’s not like that on Oxford Street anymore, or even anywhere.”
For a long time, their neighbors were a travel agent, a modeling agency and finishing school for young women, and a clairvoyant, he recalled. Their own studio had been the former workshop of the textile designer William Morris. In the last five years of the business, they moved to the back of the building, facing North Row, when it was bought by a developer; that space today is a barber shop.
But in the early days, Passport Photo Service was identifiable on the street with its “Ready in 10 minutes” slogan on the windows, as well as their roving sandwich board workers.
Sharkey began working there at 16 years old. His mother worked as the receptionist and administrator, and his uncle joined his father as a photographer. They originally used card negatives developed in the darkroom, then 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. They had studio lighting, too, a draw for making a flattering photo, Sharkey explained.
He calls the passport photo “the great equalizer” since nearly everyone in the world needs one in order to travel. And though the photogenic actors and entertainers who arrived were less likely to take a bad shot, it’s still a more candid, stripped-down view.
“Most of them didn’t come in with any makeup artists or PR, because they’ve just been to the embassy,” Sharkey said, recalling a time that the actor Donald Sutherland breezed through. “He had been to the Canadian Embassy, hadn’t got his passport, needed to renew it. Didn’t even have time to take his coat off. He just flicked his collar up.”
One of the exceptions was Kate Winslet, who in the late 1990s was accompanied by a small crew during the filming of “Hideous Kinky,” which required her character to show her passport in the film. The portrait was taken only months before “Titanic” released and made her a global star.
Celebrities, too, loved to scan the shop’s wall of fame, Sharkey said, recalling the time that Angelina Jolie came in during a quiet afternoon and pointed out everyone she’d worked with. Another, unnamed actor happened to return just after Sharkey had moved her portrait to make room, resulting in an awkward explanation. Some stars utilized their services multiple times over the years: actors Joan Collins in 1971, 1979 and 1988; Sean Connery in 1977 and 1989; Ava Gardner in 1976 and 1987; and artist David Hockney in 1965 and 1970.
Their 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. Sharkey continues the studio in this vein, still making portraits as needed for their customer base.
Not all of the celebrities they’ve snapped made the cut in “Passport Photo Service,” and a handful of those portraits remain in the vault. Sharkey said they only had to sign non-disclosure agreements a few times over the course of the business, and their identities will continue to be kept secret.
“One of them is such a pain in the butt that I wouldn’t have put them in anyway,” he said, laughing.