A Bag of Stories Magazine

We’re new here. "A Bag of Stories" is AFAR’s magazine about travel, materials, people, work, photography and what we carry. We won’t begin by asking you to follow us. Instead: who should we be paying attention to? Send us someone, somewhere or something worth knowing.

Years ago, I wrote a small field guide about photographing people whose lives were not mine. Some of its rules I would write differently today... abagofstories.com/the-territ…

inAfrica began as a network connecting Italians working across African countries. One connection brought Ayzoh! and AFAR together and became a story about business, trust, and the distance... abagofstories.com/the-distan…

In Addis Ababa, #Sabahar works with spinners, dyers and weavers whose knowledge belongs to one of Ethiopia’s oldest material traditions. Keeping that knowledge alive, however, requires more than preservation: it requires change. abagofstories.com/the-loom-i…

In LIMINA, photographer Anna Nagy looks at a corner of western Rome where family photographs, old houses, gardens, reeds, and apartment blocks occupy the same uncertain territory. Her work asks a deceptively simple question... abagofstories.com/what-a-nei…

Traveling light has little to do with owning less. It begins with a more uncomfortable question: how much of what we carry is necessary, and how much is simply our fear of being unprepared? abagofstories.com/what-we-ca…

We have never made so many images, and perhaps we have never spent so much time asking #photography to prove its own importance. There may be another way... abagofstories.com/photograph…

In #Cachoeira, #Bahia, the Irmandade da Boa Morte carries Black women’s faith, autonomy, and memory into the present... abagofstories.com/what-the-w…

We have opened a few more doors into "A Bag of Stories". Not because we need another place to promote ourselves, but because we still believe that a network can be a place where people notice one another. abagofstories.com/a-social-n…

We often say that music brings people together. Perhaps it does. But what kind of togetherness are we talking about, and what happens to disagreement, power, memory, and responsibility when the #music begins? abagofstories.com/a-common-r…

The words we use shape the worlds we are able to see. This is where "A Bag of Stories" pauses over some of them, not to fix their meaning forever, but to say what we mean when they appear in our stories. abagofstories.com/a-living-g…

A small printer takes almost no room in a #travel bag. What it can change, however, is the direction of #photography itself: an image no longer travels only with the person who made it. abagofstories.com/give-the-p…

At #Oslo’s Opera House, #architecture does something quietly radical: it refuses to keep beauty at a distance. The building is monumental, but its most important gesture may be the simplest one, it invites people in, around, and even over it. abagofstories.com/a-place-ma…

#Photographer and linguist Giulia Zhang studies the #Burji language in southern #Ethiopia. Her work moves between images and words, asking a larger question: what do we lose when we stop listening to the many ways people name the world? abagofstories.com/learning-t…

Stories are being published, photographs are finding their place, new contributors and subjects are entering the conversation. We wanted to invite you in now, while all of this is still being built. abagofstories.com/a-bag-of-s…

What if traveling well begins not with knowing where we are going, but with learning how to arrive? Marine biologist Yacciry Ahuja Jiménez reflects on science, ancestral knowledge, and the invisible things we carry across borders. abagofstories.com/echoes-of-…

The second story in an "A Bag of Stories" series exploring Ethiopian #culture through everyday practices and knowledge. At Ensira Pottery Center in #AddisAbaba, women shape the jebena amid children, kilns, fragile pots, and shared life. abagofstories.com/the-life-a…

The first story in a "A Bag of Stories" series exploring Ethiopian #culture through the practices, materials, places, and forms of knowledge that shape everyday life. We begin with food: with #teff, and with the work that comes before #injera. abagofstories.com/teff-what-…

In places where public #welfare is thin and formal employment scarce, millions of people build livelihoods one sale at a time. The informal #economy should not be romanticized but neither should it be treated as disorder to be erased. abagofstories.com/before-the…

Walking through fifty years of Graciela Iturbide’s photographs in Uruapan, I found myself thinking less about photographic style than about something harder to preserve: the ability to encounter the world... abagofstories.com/learning-t…

Through Tecla, ceramic #designer and cultural planner Camilla Garelli looks beyond the finished object, following the materials, gestures, relationships, and meanings that allow a thing to become part of a life. abagofstories.com/camilla-ga…