What Daily Life Looks Like at Different Income Levels

In Vietnam, a family living on $266 a month locks the front door of their three-bedroom home with a rusty padlock. It’s not unlike the one that shutters the entrance to the house of an Indian family living on $245 a month, or a Nepalese family with $201.

Locks are just one type of household object that the new website Dollar Street is documenting to create a snapshot of global wealth stratification. Anna Rosling Rönnlund, the cofounder of the Sweden-based Gapminder Foundation, developed the project in 2014; since then, her team of photographers has traveled to 200 homes in 50 countries. They spend at least a day in each home, interviewing the family and taking pictures of household objects—from stoves to toothbrushes to toilets to telephones—that fall into the 135 categories that Dollar Street uses as points of comparison.