Stories worth keeping
A Bag of Stories is an online magazine about travel, materials, communities, and the human intelligence behind what we carry.
We publish throughout the year
Every three months, selected stories come together in a digital edition designed to be read slowly and kept. Once a year, a special collection of our work will become a printed edition: a physical object made to remain on a shelf, return to your hands, and travel with you.
Subscribe to follow the magazine as it grows
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A magazine that lives throughout the year
A Bag of Stories is first of all an online magazine. New photo essays, journeys, field notes, interviews, and longform stories are published throughout the year, following people, places, materials, ideas, and ways of living that deserve more than a passing glance.
Subscribers receive a thoughtful selection of new stories directly by email, together with editorial notes and occasional letters from the field.
Every three months, a digital edition
Four times a year, we bring selected stories together into a digital edition of A Bag of Stories.
It is more than a collection of links. Each edition creates relationships between photographs, places, objects, voices, and ideas, something closer to an issue of a magazine than to the flow of a website. A reason to stop scrolling and start reading.
Once a year, something to hold
Once a year, A Bag of Stories will leave the screen. We will publish a limited printed edition bringing together photographs, essays, journeys, and stories from the magazine in a carefully made collectible volume. Because some stories deserve paper, weight, sequence, and time.
Travel with more attention
We are interested in travel not simply as movement, but as a way of meeting the world. That may mean following the making of a coffee pot in Addis Ababa, listening to the knowledge carried by a plant fibre in Madagascar, entering a workshop in Turin, walking through a Norwegian city, or reconsidering the ethics of taking a photograph. Near or far is not what matters. Attention is.
Discover what objects carry
A bag, a textile, a ceramic vessel, a photograph, a market stall, a meal: ordinary things can contain extraordinary amounts of knowledge.
We follow materials back to landscapes, objects back to hands, and gestures back to the communities and histories that give them meaning.
The question is not only What is this? It is also Who knows how to make it? What does it remember? What kind of world allows it to exist?
Support independent, responsible storytelling
A Bag of Stories is created by AFAR with the editorial direction of Ayzoh!, whose photographers, writers, researchers, and collaborators have spent decades working alongside communities in different parts of the world.
We believe that good storytelling requires time, context, consent, accuracy, and relationships that continue after the photograph has been made or the story published. Subscribing helps us build an editorial community around that idea.
Stay close to AFAR
Subscribers also receive selected news from the world of AFAR: materials, makers, collaborations, journeys, new collections, and occasional behind-the-scenes stories.
Subscriber benefits include 10% off purchases from the AFAR online store, as well as occasional previews, invitations, early access, and special initiatives.
Come for the stories. Stay for the journey
Subscribe to A Bag of Stories and follow a magazine being built slowly, story by story, online throughout the year, in a new digital edition every three months, and once a year, on paper.