A wonderful collection of famous faces as they appeared in everyday travel documents.
Ready for their close-up.
Sharkey and his family took hundreds of celebrity photos, pictures of everyone from John Cleese and Sean Connery to Joan Collins and Tilda Swinton. These were no paparazzi snapshots: The famous paid to have their portraits taken. They were among the many people from all walks of life who strode into the family’s studio, on Oxford Street in London, to have their passport photos taken. Passport Photo Service was in business for 66 years, closing its doors in 2019, and in that time it was visited by, among others, actors and authors and athletes and musicians. Sharkey’s father, David, a former boxer, was inspired to open a “quick and easy photography service” when hearing an American tear into “this lousy town” that couldn’t provide him with a same-day passport photo. This delightful collection includes 300 never-before-seen, mostly black-and-white images that show another side to familiar faces. We see a boyish Daniel Day-Lewis, photographed in 1987, a kerchief around his neck, a Mona Lisa smile across his lips. Stephen Fry, wearing a tie—and a devilish grin—was a regular visitor to the studio, Sharkey says in one of the accompanying notes. Fry’s headshot was displayed in the shop next to that of his comedy partner, Hugh Laurie, which, Sharkey writes, led to “good-natured and often bawdy comments from both on seeing each other’s images when visiting.” David Hockney appears in two photos, in 1965 and 1970, his prominent, round glasses giving him the appearance of a proto-Harry Potter. Chrissie Hynde, in four images from the ’80s and ’90s, has (fittingly enough) the cool look of a rock star, and Chaka Khan, in 1990, is seen beaming. The smiles have been lost to post-9/11 rules about neutral expressions. Also lost is a shop that provided a basic travel necessity, a photo that was, as Sharkey writes, a “great leveller.”
A wonderful collection of famous faces as they appeared in everyday travel documents.Pub Date: April 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781837291229
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Phaidon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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