A Living Glossary
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 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. Join our free newsletter and carry the stories with you.
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Editorial Sections
Give the Photo Back
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.
A Place Made to Be Used
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.
Learning to Listen
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?
Nothing Disappears
Seven years after photographing Foto/Industria in Bologna, we returned to images that appeared to document an exhibition. What we found was a larger story about matter, labour, memory and the temporary forms we create from the world.
A Bag of Stories is just beginning
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.
Echoes of Ancestral Winds
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.
Teff: What the Grain Carries
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.
The Travel Company That Knows When to Step Aside
Cultour was born from one man’s decision to make Brazil his home, then from a harder question: how can a travel company bring people closer to a place without turning that place into a product?
