A Love Letter to “Material World,” a ’90s Photo Book of Families With All of Their Possessions

This essay is part of a collection of love letters celebrating personal design obsessions.

In the early ’90s, if you asked me what my most valuable possession was, I probably would have said the Fisher-Price kitchen I got for my fourth birthday. My one true love—a toy—wasn’t that different, it turns out, from that of many other children around the world, at least according to Material World: A Global Family Portrait, a 1994 book by photographer Peter Menzel that later became another beloved belonging.

Material World was inspired by, of all things, Madonna. In an afterward for the book, Menzel writes that he thought of the idea after listening to an NPR story about the performer’s marketing of her highly controversial book, Sex: "The original material girl rode the crest of self-generated waves of publicity and consumerism for weeks. The book and the singer seemed to hold more interest for people than the pressing issues of our day. I thought the world needed a reality check." An award-winning documentary photographer, Menzel decided he had one: he and a group of other photographers set out to eventually shoot 30 statistically average families from the then 183 countries that were part of the United Nations—with all their stuff. "What better way to begin to understand than to show average family life around the world and to base that examination around a unique photograph of a family with all its possessions outside its dwelling?" Menzel asked.

A sort of anti-Cribs before Cribs existed, Material World makes use of the same gawking of others and their belongings that humans will never cease to enjoy. I can’t remember when we got our copy, but it was likely just a few years after it was published, probably from the (now shuttered) Strand annex in downtown Manhattan, our favorite place to acquire books. Immediately, I was enraptured by its somewhat spare outlines of families whose lives were so very different from mine, ones that somehow still cut with emotional depth.

The book can be highly analytical: each family’s details, as well as answers to questions such as their wishes versus expectations for the future, is presented alongside information about quality of life, such as income or number of children, for an average family in their country. But there is a very ’90s lens as to what gets included. Menzel writes in the methodology that he was interested in focusing on "fast growing Pacific Rim economies," as well as "former enemies of the U.S.," "countries in the news," "countries that are useful for standard comparison," and "countries that have something we can learn from and that I wanted to see." Each profile includes a brief history of the family’s home country, and a first-person account from the photographer who took their Big Picture of what it was like to spend a week with them to capture their lives. (Of all the nations approached, only Egypt refused permission, though notably, the Iraqi family was selected by government representatives, and in Bosnia, UN soldiers with large machine guns are seen in the Big Picture, ostensibly protecting the family.)

It is the Big Picture that is Material World’s real marvel. Each family is depicted outside their home with (usually almost) all of their possessions neatly placed around them. Where they are photographed is as telling as what and how much stuff they are photographed with; some families’ things neatly fit in front of their house, land stretching for miles, like in Guatemala, where the father’s goal is "to stay alive." Others must be seen from high above, like in Kuwait, where the family’s 45-foot-long basement couch takes up but one small part of the image.

There is plenty of humor in the book—when I reminded my sister of it while revisiting it for this piece, she remarked "toilets!" because yes, one of the pages is just photos of toilets from around the world. (Ethiopia’s is a tree.) And there is plenty to learn. Looking back years later, many images jumped out at me like old friends; when I reached the Uzbekistan page, for example, I remembered learning about how people there slept in the same bed under big, beautiful blankets to keep warm, and used buckets of snow to wash their hands.

But it was what some of the people wanted that they didn’t have, often things I already had, that always said more to me: usually a TV, or a motorscooter to more easily get around, but sometimes, "To have children live in a society that has joined ‘mainstream of human civilization’" (Russia) or a lamp, which acts as a "sign that power has come back on" (Bosnia). Indeed, if the children were remarkably consistent in their desires, the parents were the most heartbreaking: when asked about their most prized possession, both the mother and father of the featured family in Haiti say that they own nothing of value.

It is the contrast to the photos of an American family—as well as some of the European ones—that allow a U.S. citizen the closest vantage point of time passing. The Baptist Skeen family in Texas wants tools, a new carpet, and a camping trailer. The blurb about the state of the U.S. in the early ’90s includes the line, "In demographic shifts, the percentage of whites in the populace is shifting, which will likely lead to profound changes in a racially uneasy nation." And a caption of one photo reads: "Seven-year-old Michael spends part of the afternoon with a coloring book given to his school by the National Rifle Association. The book was intended to teach firearm safety to children—a matter of great concern to his father, Rick, who owns several guns and likes to hunt deer."

The moments captured always have an air of nostalgia, but sometimes because of how little has actually changed. Speaking of a postapartheid South Africa, the text reads, "No one knows how much time its people will need to learn to live with one another"—there is much that has not changed. The chapter title for Israel, the last country featured in the book, is titled "Fractious Peace?"

If the book’s appeal as a child was amazement at the idea of life outside of my world, as an adult, its meaning has only increased: reading it again, I was immediately struck with an image of all the things from my childhood home out on the street, not to be photographed, but as they were when we moved out after my father died. And I thought of a moment of nostalgia for myself, the scene in You’ve Got Mail with the line "You are what you read"; perhaps in the real world, the actual truism is "You are what you own." 

Menzel has since gone back and rephotographed some of the families from Material World’s pages, and published other books with tweaks on the original premise, perhaps in his continued quest to answer the question coauthor Charles C. Mann poses in its introduction: "Can all the people on earth have all the things they want?" I think we know the answer, but exploring it is still forever fascinating.

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Top photo: Cover of Material World: A Global Family Portrait (Sierra Club Books, 1994); courtesy Catapult/Counterpoint Press/Soft Skull

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