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.
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?
This is the first story in a new "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.
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.
Walking through Sebastião Salgado’s Amazônia, I entered as an admirer. I left still moved by its beauty, but carrying a harder question: when photography makes us care through wonder, what might that same beauty leave outside the frame?
At Zoma Museum in Addis Ababa, architecture, art, education, cultivation, and daily life belong to the same living system. AFAR’s relationship with the museum began in friendship and has grown through years of shared work, visits, and images.
36 portrait posters featuring the people who make AFAR bags in Addis Ababa. Inspired by a question raised by Fashion Revolution, the project brings the viewer inside the workshop: who stands behind the objects we use every day?
