Good Life Great Price is an exploration of family, identity, and consumerism. For many, the family portrait is the celebration of one’s family: Dan and I have two beautiful kids; Look how tall and handsome Tyrone has become; Rachel got her braces off last month; We are so happy to be at Mai and Tom’s 10th wedding anniversary.

In a formal family portrait, the choices a family makes in their presentation, hair style, clothing and choice of back-drop can be, misleading or not, a telling indication of how they want to present themselves. In a family portrait taken at a special occasion, the context, setting, activities can additionally serve to reveal certain qualities, true or false, about the family. In another sense, what is revealed through these noted indicators are the conclusions, guesses and stories we make when presented with a family portrait that is not our own.

This piece was inspired by a trip in April 2005 to a Sears portrait studio, during which we dressed in Sears clothing and posed in six family-style portraits to commemorate our often dysfunctional, “grouping” with one another, which we could only describe as a sort of family. The resulting photos were an uncanny depiction of a bizarre family whose story we couldn’t quite pin down, but inspired us to explore them and other stories. We then shot video and photographs of ourselves dressed in the clothes of the homeowners in real homes throughout the New York City area.