The Inventory of Childhood

Every generation gets told it’s the most spoiled one yet. Kids today, with their phones and PlayStations, they don’t know how good they have it—whereas back in our day, apparently, we were thrilled with a hollow rock and decent weather. Bullshit. I was a comprehensively spoiled child and I knew it. Enough Game Boy cartridges to fill a shoebox, Lego in quantities I could actually hide inside, action figures deployed across my bedroom floor in strict hierarchical formation. I was a tiny, pampered monster and I owned it.

Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti spent years traveling the world visiting children and asking them to lay out all their possessions for the camera. The project is called Toy Stories, and it does what the best documentary photography does—uses a simple formal constraint to reveal something you couldn’t explain in words. A girl in Malawi next to a single handmade doll. A boy in Texas buried under enough plastic military hardware to occupy a small nation. The gap between those two images is the whole argument.

What actually gets me is how constant the psychology is across all of it. The pride of arrangement, the specific gravity each child assigns to each object, the way they position themselves—territorial, proprietorial, completely earnest. I remember that feeling exactly. You just eventually learn not to show it.