Shelf Life – 2010

Look at all those toys

I’ve always enjoyed taking pictures to document the world around me.

When I was a kid in the 90s, my mom managed the electronics section of a department store, and at one point she brought home a binder that contained a planogram from the Nintendo rep, and I was kind of lowkey obsessed with it. I just loved hanging out and looking at all of the video game displays. I got my first smartphone in 2010, and suddenly, I had a half decent camera with me wherever I went. And as a toy and game collector, I was going to… well, stores to look at toys and games. So I started taking pictures of these displays to document how these store shelves would evolve over time, and as I started documenting my plush collection, these photos became a valuable resource.

2010 is an interesting year to start, because we really started seeing an explosion of Mario and Sonic merchandise on a level that I hadn’t really remembered seeing since the late 80s and early 90s. I was making the rounds at Toys R Us pretty regularly back then, so that’s where things begin.