A Bag of Stories is a magazine and cultural platform — by AFAR + Ayzoh! — exploring how we travel, what we carry, how we look, and the relationships we create along the way / more
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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?
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: move the photographer away from the center, and ask what an image can actually do in the life of someone else.
In Cachoeira, Bahia, the Irmandade da Boa Morte carries Black women’s faith, autonomy, and memory into the present. Its August celebration invites us into a living tradition, and reminds us that not everything we encounter through travel is ours to possess.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
