All The World’s A Play

Emma Rouillon enjoys a photographic collection of the children of the world and their favourite toys.

Some artists have the ability to take the stuff of ordinary life and turn it into an exceptional exhibition.

In his show at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti presents children from 58 countries together with the toys they play with every day. By presenting them in this way, he allows us viewers to recover our sweetest memories of childhood; he also enables us to compare our own experience of childhood with the further 58 versions on display.

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‘Leaping from Zambia to Sweden and Japan to Mexico, the photographs provide a moving, funny and thought provoking glimpse into the lives of these children,’ says Galimberti.

Although toys are the window into a child’s fantasy, Galimberti shows us how closely tied they are to each child’s reality. As their toys speak to the children concerned, so the war planes collected by American boys and the wooden figurines belonging to the kids of Zanzibar, also speak of the specific social backgrounds and the particular economic conditions these children are growing up in; likewise, the toys made in the image of their parents’ occupation, such as the plastic bucket, shovel and wheelbarrow which are the prized possessions of a little girl living on a farm in Italy.

But for all their differences and inequalities, all the children shown here have at least one thing in common – the overwhelming desire to play. In his study of the various children of the world and the variety of their toys, Galimberti has also captured the universal character of childhood.

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