About A Bag of Stories
A Bag of Stories is a magazine and cultural platform about travel, materials, people, and the ways we encounter one another. It grows from an ongoing collaboration between AFAR and Ayzoh!.
Start Here ➜Stories begin before we arrive
A bag is never only a bag. A photograph is never only an image. A journey does not begin when we board a plane, and a place does not become meaningful because someone from elsewhere has discovered it.
Everything carries something with it: labor, memory, materials, knowledge, relationships, choices.
A Bag of Stories began from this idea.
We wanted a place where the worlds surrounding AFAR could be explored without reducing them to products or destinations: the people who make things, the landscapes materials come from, the economies that sustain communities, the rituals of everyday life, the ways we travel, and the responsibility involved in looking at lives different from our own.
Sometimes a story begins with raffia gathered in Madagascar. Sometimes with clay becoming a coffee pot in Addis Ababa, a roof overlooking the Oslo harbor, a small company building a different kind of economy, or a photograph that raises an uncomfortable question. We follow the story wherever it leads.
AFAR and Ayzoh!
A Bag of Stories grows from the meeting of two different practices. AFAR works through design, materials, travel, craftsmanship, and the life of objects. Its bags move between places, carrying with them the work of makers and the histories of the materials from which they are made.
Ayzoh! works through documentary photography, research, publishing, and long-term relationships with communities. For more than two decades, its photographers and researchers have worked across different parts of the world, often returning to the same places and people over many years.
The differences between these two worlds are precisely what make the collaboration interesting.
AFAR asks what we carry. Ayzoh! asks how we enter the lives of others, how we look at them, and what responsibilities remain after we leave.
A Bag of Stories is where those questions meet.
AFAR supports the platform and participates in its development. Ayzoh! leads its editorial work and brings to it a documentary practice shaped in the field. Together, the two organizations are building something broader than a conventional brand magazine: a space for stories, conversations, exhibitions, publications, and public encounters.
What we believe
We believe that travel can still be an extraordinary form of education, provided that movement is not confused with understanding.
We believe that places are not backgrounds for our experiences. They already have histories, conflicts, humor, knowledge, beauty, contradictions, and futures of their own.
We believe that the people we meet should never become scenery.
We are interested in craftsmanship, but not in romanticizing labor. In tradition, but not in pretending cultures stand still. In beauty, but not when beauty erases context. In sustainability, but not as a vocabulary detached from the people whose livelihoods depend upon land, materials, and work.
We do not believe that humanity becomes more authentic the farther we travel.
It can reveal itself in an Indigenous community, in a workshop in Addis Ababa, in a kitchen, on a street in Rimini, in an office in Mexico, on a roof in Oslo, or wherever people listen to one another, argue, make things, care for someone, resist, remember, invent, and continue. The extraordinary is often hidden inside ordinary life.
Looking is part of the journey
Photography has been central to Ayzoh!’s work and to many of the stories published here. That has also taught us that making an image is never a neutral act.
Who photographs whom? Who gives permission? Who chooses the caption? What happens when an image leaves the place where it was made? What happens to a person when a complicated life is reduced to a single photograph?
These questions are at the heart of The Ethics of Looking, an ongoing editorial and public program within A Bag of Stories.
It draws on Ayzoh!’s documentary experience while extending the conversation into the worlds of travel, media, design, culture, and everyday image-making.
The aim is not to establish a rulebook for looking at other people. It is to keep the questions alive.
Why a magazine?
Because commerce also produces stories about the world. Fashion tells us where beauty lives. Advertising tells us what to desire. Tourism tells us which places deserve our attention. Photography decides what becomes visible and what remains outside the frame.
We think these narratives deserve scrutiny.
A company can choose simply to describe what it sells. AFAR chose to help create a place where more difficult questions can also be asked.
That does not mean pretending commerce disappears from these pages. AFAR is part of the story. Its materials, makers, collaborations, and choices will sometimes become subjects themselves.
But the purpose of A Bag of Stories is larger: to understand some of the human systems surrounding the things we make, buy, photograph, visit, and carry with us.
A bag of stories
There is no single way to read this magazine. You can enter through travel, food, photography, materials, design, anthropology, craftsmanship, business, or a story about one person in one particular place.
Eventually, the paths begin to cross. That is the idea. The world does not come divided into editorial sections. Neither do people. And every time we travel through it, we carry something away. The question is what we do with what we have been given.
Stay in the conversation
A Bag of Stories is meant to remain open: to questions, ideas, collaborations, criticism, and stories we have not yet encountered. If something here resonates with your work — or if you simply want to ask us something — we would be glad to hear from you.