Parents are spending thousands on family photo shoots, but they’re not just doing it for the ‘gram

When Sara Bloom heard about candid family photography — and saw examples of documentary, day-in-the-life-style pictures on social media — she knew it’d be a worthwhile investment.

“There was something about being in the thick of motherhood and family life that I wanted to remember in a really authentic way,” said Bloom, a 36-year-old physician who specializes in maternal health and has three children under the age of 4. “Every day is challenging and chaotic.”

Over the past two years, Bloom and her husband, Sam, an ex-Google employee who recently opened a chestnut farm and retreat space, have spent upward of $4,500 for three documentary family shoots.

Ardmore photographer Polina Bulman comes to their Haverford home to shoot the two-hour “family storytelling” sessions, which start at $1,400 for a two-hour session and digital photos. Prices increase for longer four- or eight-hour sessions, and physical albums are an additional cost. Bulman shoots 30 to 50 of these sessions a year.

Bloom views the shoots, and the physical album of memories, as a “gift for the family,” she said. “It’s well worth it.”

Many new parents are increasingly prioritizing professional photography, sometimes going all in at every stage of parenthood — even birth — for a cost of at least a few hundred dollars per shoot. In the Philadelphia region, a 15-minute “mini session” with an experienced professional can cost $250 or more, and the bill can easily exceed $2,000 for a high-end photographer’s larger packages that include multi-hour sessions, albums, wall art, and digital files.

Some want to have maternity photos, in which they are snuggled on their couch staring at a sonogram; newborn photos, where their swaddled sleeping baby is captured up close and personal; and regular family photos of adults and kiddos romping around at home or in a neighborhood park or on the beaches of the Jersey Shore.

Often, the photos are in a style that appears unstaged.

“The more candid style I’ve noticed within the past few years,” said Hirmoi van der Goes, a Roxborough-based family photographer who has been in the industry for about a decade. “With children especially, it helps take away the stress of giving a lot of directions, looking at the camera all the time.”

Fewer parents today are asking for the posed family portraits that they may have been subjected to in their youth. Instead many are opting for lifestyle photography — a mix of candids, with some photographer direction, and relaxed portraits — or documentary, which involves no posing or direction.

In these photos, “you’re getting more genuine memories,” said Sam Reed, a Fishtown lifestyle photographer, “as opposed to being this staged-families-all-wearing-plaid-at-JCPenney situation.”

It’d be easy to dismiss this increased demand as a kind of digital keeping up with the Joneses, just another example of social media-induced excess.

But photographers and consumers say it actually feels like the opposite: Parents want the high-quality, printed memories in a world where they already have thousands of photos, the vast majority of which are stored digitally.

“We’re coming back into this wave of ‘it’s really important to have these photos and these memories permanently encapsulated,’” said Reed, 31, noting that some Gen Zers who were born at the start of the cell phone age have few physical photos of their childhood. She thought people didn’t care about physical printed photos when she got into the business in 2021 but was proven wrong.

Consumers are “getting excited to create this type of time capsule for their families,” Bulman said. “Most of my families order books or albums. They end up with this library of childhood and parenthood memories right there on their shelves.”

Physical photo albums are “one thing that our generation was starting to miss out on” as they started families, said Jennifer Nese, 34, a stay-at-home mom in Butler, N.J., who paid more than $500 for a family session with Lauren Brimhall, a West Chester-based lifestyle and documentary photographer.

She got photos from her session a few years ago — before she had her fourth child — developed to hang on her wall and made calendars of the pictures for her grandparents. She plans to add to her collection with another family session once her youngest, who is 3 months old, gets a little older.

Like many family photographers and their clients, Brimhall and Nese go way back — Brimhall has been shooting Nese since her engagement.

For Brimhall, a photographer for 14 years, wedding photography still makes up about 90% of her business. Her wedding prices start at $3,200, but some consumers opt for more expensive packages that can be around $10,000. A lifestyle family session is around $400 for an hour and a half, while documentary family sessions are $500 for four hours or $850 for the whole day.

When she started out in 2009, “documentary family photography was hardly a thing,” Brimhall said. “That really came into being in the later years of my career.”

Part of it, she said, seems like an evolution. As lifestyle and documentary wedding photography become more popular (see: photos of just-married couple enjoying small moments together throughout their day or of a dog in a bow tie licking the flower girl) and those couples went on to have children, they were drawn to the same style for their family pictures, too.

Documentary photos “are actually real moments,” she said. “I don’t go, ‘Redo.’ I don’t go, ‘Do that again.’”

“I grew up in the early ‘90s where I have all those old videotapes from my parents,” said Bloom, the Haverford mom who has done three documentary sessions with Bulman. “Now everything is on the iPhone, and everything can be so curated. I wanted something where I could remember the real moment.”