Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2006, Family Shops is Paolo Pellizzari’s photographic account of small, family-run retailers across the world. The book follows these businesses from Asmara to Shanghai and from Los Angeles to Marrakech, locating its subject in the ordinary spaces where commerce, domestic life, and inherited work meet. Its central premise is quietly consequential: despite the pressures of globalization, people continue to maintain the businesses begun by their parents.

Pellizzari approaches this subject through colorful panoramic photographs, giving the shop interiors and their proprietors a broad, attentive field of view. The images are not simply records of merchandise or façades; they place people within the visual and material environments of their work, allowing local particularity to remain visible across the book’s wide geographic range. Read together, the photographs establish a productive tension between the repeated function of the shop and the distinct social worlds it contains.

That structure gives Family Shops its lasting interest for collectors. It is a substantial photographic study of a form of small-scale commerce often overshadowed by standardized global retail, yet it avoids reducing its subjects to a single sociological argument. Instead, the book’s interest lies in comparison: different places, customs, displays, and generations are brought into relation through a consistent photographic language. The result is both a record of working family life and a considered portrait of continuity under changing economic conditions.

The 2006 English-language edition comprises 156 pages and 60 colour illustrations in a 29 × 23 cm hardcover with jacket. Its coherent subject, international scope, and sustained use of the panoramic colour image make it a distinctive addition to collections concerned with documentary photography, vernacular commerce, and the social life of place.