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Digital Camera World
Digital Camera World
Tom May

No stylist, no lighting rig… but passport photos make some of the best celebrity pictures. This new book helps me understand why with its mugshots of Joan Collins, Mick Jagger, Mohammad Ali and more

Dave and Philip Sharkey talk in the cramped darkroom at Passport Photo Service in 1978, with a Kodak Versamat processing machine and a Beseler enlarger visible among the equipment around them.

Ever since I came across Passport Photo Service: An Unexpected Archive of Celebrity Portraits, I've been thinking about portrait photography differently. Published by Phaidon, this new book brings together more than 300 photographs taken at a single London studio between 1953 and 2019.

Its subjects include Muhammad Ali, Sean Connery, Mick Jagger, Joan Collins, Madonna, Kate Winslet, Tilda Swinton and David Hockney. Yet none of them were there to get publicity shots. They were there to get a travel document.

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