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…