The passport picture is the most democratic form of portraiture. Everyone has to obey the same rules: eyes forward, no grinning. But, as these passports of the stars reveal, even the brutality of the photo booth cannot dim true glamour.
The machine must have melted when Marilyn Monroe fixed her gaze on it. As for Andrey Hepburn, the passport office appears to have accepted an artful publicity shot. And Muhammad Ali just punches his personality through the document. The British passport office is a bit stricter, to judge from Alfred Hitchcock's mugshot. But then, the great director probably savoured the joke that he looks like a criminal. Johnny Cash really would shoot a man in Reno just to see him die, looking at his photo, which resembles an inmate record from Folsom Prison.
Only Whitney Houston and Albert Einstein surrender to the banality of the passport photograph, as most of us do when we're gearing up for our holidays.
