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.
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.
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.
This is the second story in an "A Bag of Stories" series exploring Ethiopian culture through everyday practices and knowledge. At Ensira Pottery Center in Addis Ababa, women shape the jebena amid children, kilns, fragile pots, and shared life.
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.
AFAR uses vegetable-tanned zebu leather and horn recovered from existing Ethiopian farming and food systems. “By-product” is not a claim of innocence. It describes where the material begins, and the responsibility that follows.
AFAR took its name from a region of salt, heat, distance, and human endurance. Years later, the name still asks a question: what does it mean to carry a place with you?
Ayzoh! works with Awra Amba to carry its ideas beyond the Ethiopian highlands through photography, publishing, and long-term relationships. AFAR is among the principal partners supporting this work and helping the community’s voice reach readers around the world.
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?
