Definition
Dollar Street is a photographic dataset, built by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, that visits hundreds of homes around the world and photographs the same household objects in each — beds, toilets, stoves, toothbrushes, shoes, toys.
Families are sorted not by country but by monthly income per person, so the project lays out a continuous "street" of households from Level 1 to Level 4. Side-by-side, the photos make the four-level income model concrete.
Why it matters
How it works
Each household answers a short income survey and then opens their home to a photographer who shoots from a standard checklist. The result is a matrix: rows are homes (sorted by income), columns are object types. Scrolling left to right along any row shows what one family owns; scrolling top to bottom along any column shows how a single object — say, a toilet — evolves from a hole in the ground to a porcelain bowl with a heated seat.
The project deliberately avoids country labels in the default view. A family's flag is a footnote; the prominent metadata is their dollar-per-day income. This re-anchors the viewer's mental model from "rich country / poor country" to a continuous spectrum.
For an instructor or analyst, Dollar Street is the visual companion to any quantitative claim about world poverty: if a number sounds abstract, the matching photos make it tangible.