What We Keep

Everyone makes fun of how spoiled kids are these days with their PlayStations and phones. I was completely, unrepentantly spoiled—two Barbie dream houses, their ugly motorhome, stacks of GameBoy games, Lego I could disappear into. I treated my toys like private property.

Gabriele Galimberti, an Italian photographer, spent time around the world asking children to show him their possessions. Then he photographed them with whatever they owned—sometimes a lot, sometimes barely anything. It depends where you are. The series is called Toy Stories.

What gets you looking at these photos is how they render childhood both completely universal and totally arbitrary. There’s this girl with the exact same Minni Mouse I had. Seeing it in her collection somehow made it feel like it was never really mine, just something all of us were supposed to have. The real story isn’t about the objects though. It’s about what kids decide matters, what they’ll pose with, what they’ve claimed as theirs. That’s identity forming in real time.

I think about the ones with almost nothing and the ones buried in stuff. Galimberti doesn’t judge. He’s just showing you what childhood actually looks like when you look at it—the weight of small objects, the way we decide they define us. Maybe they do.