Love This! "Toy Stories"

Botlhe - Maun, Botswana

Today's featured artist, Gabriele Galimberti, spent 18 months traveling the world to take photographs of children and their favorite toys. The results of this project are really wonderful, beautiful, and moving, yet what he discovered on this creative adventure is almost as interesting as the art that he created:

“At their age, [children] are pretty all much the same...They just want to play.” But how they play can reveal a lot. “The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them,” says the Italian, who would often join in with a child’s games before arranging the toys and taking the photograph. “In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.” 

Yet even children worlds apart share similarities when it comes to the function their toys serve. Galimberti talks about meeting a six-year-old boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers they believed waited for them at night – from kidnappers and poisonous animals respectively. More common was how the toys reflected the world each child was born into: so the girl from an affluent Mumbai family loves Monopoly, because she likes the idea of building houses and hotels, while the boy from rural Mexico loves trucks, because he sees them rumbling through his village to the nearby sugar plantation every day.
-From Ben Machell's article, "Toy Stories" about the project

Some of my favorite images from this series are below (although you can see the entire series here):

Pavel - Kiev, Ukraine

Jaqueline - Manila, Philippines

Arafa & Aisha - Bububu, Zanzibar

Orly - Brownsville, Texas

Chiwa - Mchinji, Malawi

Tyra - Stockholm, Sweden

Alessia - Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy

Shaira - Mumbai, India

Taha - Beirut, Lebanon

Maudy - Kalulushi, Zambia

Aren't they great? I love how you can catch a glimpse of each child's personality within the composition. 
Here's another interesting observation that Galimberti made after completing the project: 

Ultimately, the toys on display reveal the hopes and ambitions of the people who bought them in the first place. “Doing this, I learnt more about the parents than I did about the kids...There was the Latvian mother who drove a taxi for a living, and who showered her son with miniature cars; the Italian farmer whose daughter proudly displayed her plastic rakes, hoes and spades." Parents from the Middle East and Asia, he found, would push their children to be photographed even if they were initially nervous or upset, while South American parents were “really relaxed, and said I could do whatever I wanted as long as their child didn’t mind”. [From "Toy Stories"]

You can read more about this project and view all of the photographs on Galimberti's website, here. 

Namaste!
Mary Catherine