Chiwa - Mchinji, Malawi

All kids love toys, but how kids from around the world play with them show striking cultural differences and some comforting similarities. In his Toy Stories photo series, Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti spent 18 months photographing children from around the world and their most prized toy possessions. He said:

"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 ... 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."

Ben Machell of The Times Magazine wrote:

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.

Visit Galimberti's website for more marvelous Toy Stories photos: Link - via Feature Shoot, Thanks özi!

Some of our favorite photos:

Tangawizi - Keekorok, Kenya

Watcharapom - Bangkok, Thailand

Virginia - American Fork, Utah

Tyra - Stockholm, Sweden

Arafa & Aisha - Bububu, Zanzibar

View many more at Galimberti's official website: Link