The Rise of the $1,000 Family Photo
6 min read
Kirsten Bethmann started photographing families in 2005. She was living in the Outer Banks, in North Carolina, and found the era’s default aesthetic to be pretty uninspired—“families standing stiffly in sand dunes,” as she described it to me. So, when she entered the field, she drew from her background in photojournalism and tried something more natural: She’d instruct families to play on the beach for most of their hour-long session, then spend 10 minutes taking traditional, posed photos. She even drafted contracts making clients swear they wouldn’t show up in matching outfits or dress head to toe in khaki and white.
The first year, she had a dozen customers. Twenty years later, her services are in such high demand that some people fly her out of the state, even out of the country, and shell out $7,000 for a day-long shoot.
At a time when nearly anyone can easily take a high-quality photo with their smartphone, you might assume that people like Bethmann would be struggling to find work. But the number of working professional photographers has actually grown about 15 percent in the past decade, according to Census Bureau data, and is expected to keep rising. Family photography is one of the field’s most popular specialties. Rates as steep as Bethmann’s are uncommon. Only 3 percent of families who get their picture taken pay more than $4,000, a report by the Professional Photographers of America found, and more than a third pay less than $500. Still, a lot of people spend more than you might realize: Nearly 40 percent of customers dish out more than $1,000 for a shoot.
Putting so much money toward professional photos may seem extravagant. But family pictures have, of course, long been highly valued heirlooms. The impulse to hold on to a memory is almost primal—think of ancestors drawing on cave walls or telling stories around a fire. Today, that age-old instinct of preservation is colliding with new pressures from social media for people to measure up to what they see online, propelling demand and transforming how and why families capture their memories: what the photos look like, what they cost, and, crucially, who they are for.
For thousands of years, only elites could afford portraits of their loved ones. But in the early 1800s, the invention of the camera gradually opened up that luxury to the middle class, especially as a way to memorialize important family moments, even deaths. By the end of the century, pictures had become as fundamental a wedding ritual as saying “I do,” Alex Alberro, an art-history professor at Columbia, told me. They served as “a certification” of what had happened. In the decades that followed, independent portrait studios began to pop up around the country, letting families capture less significant events, too. The photography chain Olan Mills opened its first permanent shop in Arkansas in 1938, and many department stores added studios. Before long, driving to the mall with your family to give your biggest, tightest smiles for a relatively affordable, 15-minute shoot (sometimes in matching outfits) felt like a middle-class custom.
Then, in the 1990s, digital cameras revolutionized photography. And in 2007, the iPhone, with its built-in camera, disrupted the market further. If the digital camera dealt an early blow to photo studios by offering a cheaper, more convenient alternative to film, the smartphone’s flexibility supplanted the studio’s rigidity almost entirely. By the mid-2010s, photo studios began closing. Sears and Walmart shut down the last of theirs in 2013. JCPenney still operates about 400, the only remaining department-store photo studios.
At the same time as smartphones were shaping how and where families took photos, social media was redefining how they shared those images with others. In the past, pictures were for you and perhaps your family and friends. They might have decorated your walls and filled your albums. “Instagram changed everything,” Karen North, a digital and social-media professor at the University of Southern California and a licensed psychologist, told me. The app gave personal photos a larger audience than ever. Now, across all social-media platforms, hundreds of millions of images are posted every day.
The potential dangers of scrolling through so much highly curated imagery are well known. Research has found that the social comparisons it induces can be associated with feelings of anxiety and depression, and that getting likes and comments on your posts can trigger the release of the feel-good chemical dopamine. Professional photographs promise to draw the clicks some people’s brains crave. Mothers, who spend more time than fathers on caregiving and household responsibilities such as scheduling these shoots, may feel outsize pressure to project a perfect image: According to a 2016 study commissioned by Instagram, the average mom checks the app six times a day. And a 2023 CDC report found that most moms who use Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook check them daily. Moms on social media are likely inundated by images of smiling, happy families. Seen in this light, it’s not surprising that they might choose to spend hundreds—if not thousands—of dollars on slick family photos, to keep up with their cousin, their co-worker, anyone with an enviable online life.
But families today are eschewing the studio’s timed grins and cringe-inducing poses to instead convey an air of authenticity: a child caught mid-laugh, a parent breastfeeding on the couch. Instagram didn’t completely upend professional photography; it loosened its aesthetic. Now fancy photographers tend to capture families playing in open fields and documenting births in intense detail. The platform is filled with selfies and candid snapshots—or, at least, snapshots that look candid. Blurry pictures carry more social currency than sharp ones, and a too-bright flash imparts a gritty charm that perfect staging cannot. “On social media, photos that get posted are less about polish and precision and more about sharing experiences and telling stories,” Tim Gorichanaz, a Drexel University professor, wrote in The Conversation.
All of this imperfection might seem easy enough to capture on an iPhone, but that’s underestimating how sophisticated the average person’s photographic tastes have become. “It’s not just pressing a button,” Jenny Jimenez, a freelance photographer based in Seattle, told me. Photography is a highly technical art; a successful shoot requires the right alchemy of light, location, and weather, not to mention skill in framing, editing, and nurturing trust with your subjects. After 20 years working with families, Jimenez knows the challenges well: teens and spouses who don’t want to be there, controlling parents who quash their children’s natural spontaneity, family members who just won’t let go for a candid shot. She’s learned a few essential lessons, including that kids are usually more comfortable in their own home—and that better pictures come when they’re comfortable. But sometimes the antics still surprise her. Once, when she was with a family at a park, the 9-year-old son spotted two schoolmates standing next to the bridge where the clients were headed to shoot. Humiliated at the prospect of being seen, the son ran off with Jimenez’s camera and threatened to throw it over the bridge. (Fortunately, she persuaded him to give it back.)
For families who can’t afford upscale pictures, more reasonably priced professional options have emerged. Reporting this article, I learned about Shoott, which operates in more than 60 cities across the U.S. and offers 30-minute, low-cost sessions with freelance photographers in places like a park or public plaza. Families make up about 80 percent of its customers, the CEO and a co-founder, Jennifer Tsay, estimates.
Of course, families could also just use their smartphones. But for moms (who, in some families, aren’t photographed with their kids very much), for single parents (who don’t always have another adult around to take a picture), or for those who just aren’t the self-documenting type, getting some help may make preserving memories easier. Maybe they’ll choose to post the photo on Instagram, or maybe they’ll squirrel it away for future generations—a small but shiny reminder of what it was like to all be together.
