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 fifty years of Graciela Iturbide’s photographs in Uruapan, I found myself thinking less about photographic style than about something harder to preserve: the ability to encounter the world without already knowing what the picture should be.
Through Tecla, ceramic designer and cultural planner Camilla Garelli looks beyond the finished object, following the materials, gestures, relationships, and meanings that allow a thing to become part of a life.
A wedding may last one night, but the economy built around it extends across many lives. In San Miguel de Allende, Penzi Weddings & Events offers a way to examine what luxury can produce when beauty, labor, local knowledge, and responsibility are understood as parts of the same system.
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.
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.
This article opens "The Ethics of Looking", an ongoing "A Bag of Stories" series about photography, language, travel, and the responsibilities that come with representing someone else’s life.
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?
