Sets 1-20 | Sets 21-40 | Sets 41-60 | Sets 61-80 | Sets 81-100 | Sets 101-110 | Sets 111-130 | Sets 131-150 | Sets 151-170 | Sets 171-180 | Sets 181-190

A random assortment focused more on toys over objects and media. Every set is accompanied by commentary on the series.

Set #181

LEGO is one of the most prolific toy brands in the world and has been around basically forever, so it’s no surprise that it’s shown up in this series often. I sort my photographed LEGO sets in a few different ways. Fully intact sets from the 1980s-early 2000s (seen mostly in the Isometry collage in the upper quadrant), were built from complete sets. Some photos are of memorable playset pieces like moulded baseplates or boats, while others are of personal creative things built in the past and that have survived for decades. And some, like this segment of the popular 1994 Pizza to Go, are only fragments of sets that have avoided being broken down and sorted, usually by having hidden away in a storage box all this time. The custom airplane seen in Wireless, the largest custom creation in the series, was built in 2006, the current cut-off year for all Nostalgicons.

On Belle and Dresser: Sometimes an object is begging to be paired with something else that is unrelated to it. In this case, I wanted to take advantage of having a mirror on the dresser. I don’t go out of my way to combine toys like this, instead grabbing a mate that will “just work” and is in the same bin or area I’m digging through. These pairings are infrequent but inject a little bit of those old “kids playing with whatever they find a in a toy box” halcyon days into the series. The first instance of this was way back in the third collage, Fire, with a bird on Lucy’s head.

Set #182

While shooting a full set of ten, and usually for a few weeks afterwards, I tend to have several variations of a dream where I discover a cache of old toys from some forgotten corner of childhood. Sometimes I even visit my old house, which I moved out of at six and have precious few memories of, and discover a box of relics that were left behind. These are the kinds of dreams that make you excited and soon after leave you with waking disappointment. In the real world, every toy or object I find and archive feels like immortalizing another tiny treasure that played some microscopic role in my childhood. And then, sometimes, I find one of those dream stashes for real.

These ten sets will heavily feature objects that I had forgotten about, and had been locked away in a storage unit for years, maybe two decades in some cases. Said unit is full of my dad’s artwork and things used for his installation pieces at art shows. Usually probably only once, or not at all; instead just being there as an option.

While a good portion of this discovery are just wax mold cheap figures, there are enough of the good toys to help make these series-twilight sets more feasible, since I’ve been running on fumes for available stuff to shoot for a while (no surprise, given that I’ve probably photographed at least 5,000 individual things by now).

Still, even little bits of simple plastic figures can be interesting enough to shoot. Case in point, the cowboys here. I don’t know why one is big and the other is Mighty Max-scaled, but there’s something to be said about finding a repeated design in the box they both share.

If you’re curious about my dad’s art, I maintain a website with images of many of his pieces: whitcombprojects.com

Set #183

Media, like video games and tapes, computer software, magazines, and DVDs have appeared in the series since the very first set of ten, though it’s rarely been the focus, and typically acts as “fluff” or “set dressing” for the more personal and interesting-to-look-at toys. Media has been in the spotlight twice: in one segment of the Trefoil collage, and in the top bar of Wireless.

Media has always felt more mass produced and impersonal, and most of it has carried on as the form has evolved, ie from video tapes to DVDs and beyond, so I usually only bring in pictures of such things when the movie, etc, or physical object containing it stands out in my memory significantly, is a favorite of mine, or feels a little more rare and special. If I wanted to shoot every tape, game, book, magazine, CD, and DVD me and my parents collected, I could easily make a second series as big as this one, already at 1800+ pictures, and it would likely be pretty boring to look at.

Set #184

Beanie Babies, instantly recognizable and were prolific in the 90s and early 2000s, are not worth the thousands of dollars today that they were “supposed” to be, and can often still be found in thrift stores en masse for cheap. Still, the collection we built up while they were around was large enough to sustain their presence throughout this series, and digging them out and handling their soft, high quality material for shoots has always given me little nostalgic flashbacks.

There have been a few times where both the regular Beanie Baby and its smaller McDonald’s counterpart (which were sometimes in even higher demand) have shown up across the collages.

Also, Monthy Python is a central influence on my sense of humor.

Set #185

Most, but not all of the collages have a theme, either color or content based. While they’re fairly obvious, here they are:

Colors: Water, Fire, Tree, Screen, Rainbow (Colorful objects), Star (10 sets of color-themed items), Collide (Warm and Cool)

Subject: Wireless (Only Early 2000s things), Hourglass & Time (Divided 1980s-2000s items and Pre-1980s), Pyramid (Characters), Trefoil (Toys-Media-Objects), Isometry (Quadrant of Characters, Cheap Toys, Figures, and LEGOs).

Themeless: Spiral, Geometry, Circles, Radial (But has a high object count), Doorway.

This current set of ten, the 180s, will be the last themeless collage, composed of whatever I find and centered around “lost” toys found in the family storage unit. It does, however, a minor thing going on where each set only has two media objects.

Set #186

Most of what I shoot is still in my, or my family’s possession. Some things were a part of my childhood but had to be refound or rebought. Some things I never owned, but still have a connection to my past, whether close or distant. Together, these thousands of things form a portrait and identity, even though each tiny thing contributed little to it. In that way, this series is about both collective nostalgia, and a personal one. Many objects and toys are familiar to many people. Others are very obscure, likely with lost histories, and may be things no one has ever taken a serious photograph of before.

Set #187

Shooting popular, well recognized toys draws the eye of more viewers, after the finished collages has already beckoned them over. While mass-produced and usually still easily found everywhere, these objects are also completely unique in their wear and tear and in the stories attached to them. Acquisition, handling, the environment where they were kept, the amount of time they were played with or neglected; these are not things that have been sealed away immediately after production. Of course, most of those stories have been lost over time. Some specific memories of interacting with the toys, books, and everything else remain, still exist. For the majority, though, I can’t say how they ended up in my collection, so digging into a bin from the past is like pulling out unexpected fossils. Only, you know they once meant something to you, before being forgotten.

Set #188

After many years working on this project on and off, I’ve finally photographed my copy of Super Mario 64, having shot most (if not quite all) of my Nintendo 64 collection. I’d been holding off on it, trying to make it a little more special by including the official player’s guide for it, but unfortunately it just never turned up. Luckily, though, this Nintendo 64 promo tape did, which I must’ve watched several times at least, and it made for the next best companion to the legendary game.

The buildup and hype for Nintendo’s transition into 3D gaming was one of the more memorable eras of my childhood, and like many kids in 1996, I got my console (with Mario and Pilotwings, naturally) on Christmas Day. And the game still has all of my saves on it, after all these years.

Set #189

Self-created or artistic items have appeared infrequently across the series, but only if I consider them familiar constructs that would be familiar to a number of people who were also kids at the time. For example, the wooden boat seen in Set 10, or the bead animals, typically lizards, which have cropped up a few times and were created en masse during a certain phase in the house—where they still reside, in scattered locations.

Somewhat similarly, we also have Pokémon Snap photographs printed at Blockbuster that are over 25 years old. Getting to add a semi-unique touch to the series through things like these helps to make a project documenting the stuff of childhood even more personal.

Set #190

When applicable, which is most of the time (an exception being more circular objects like cups or the rockets here), objects have tended to be facing or pointing to the left throughout the series, unless its “better side” is seen when it’s facing to the right, which is chosen for any number of reasons. While not a hard rule, this is done to make the majority of objects “look” towards the past, given how the western world tends to read from left to right.

In Wireless, the eleventh collage shaped like a wi-fi icon, most objects were facing towards the right instead; looking “ahead.” Originally, that one was to be the last of the series and was the first and then only planned collage to feature objects from the early 2000s, exclusively. Hence, with eyes towards the future. The rule of looking to the past is again the norm.