These Kids Want to Show You Their Favorite Toys

Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti photographed children all over the world posing with their favorite toys, from Alaska to India to Africa to South America. “For every photograph, I would spend the entire day with the family,” he says in the introduction to his book, Toy Stories: Photos of Children from Around the World and Their Favorite Things published by Abrams Image. “In some places, like China and the Middle East, the parents would push their children hard to pose for the photos, even if the kids didn’t seem comfortable. It could be a bit embarassing. I didn’t want to take pictures of crying children.”

Galimberti found that the fewer toys a child had, the less possessive he or she was about them, and that free-roaming children tended to be more likely to share their toys than city children who often play alone.

“My eighty-five year-old grandmother doesn’t know where some of the countries I visited are — places like Zambia, Malawi, or Fiji — but she remembers her favorite toys. Everybody does.”