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New to A Bag of Stories? There is no required route through the magazine. Begin with a material, a place, a photograph, a person, or simply a question that stays with you.
About Us ➜You can begin almost anywhere
With a coffee pot in Addis Ababa. A leaf from Madagascar. A roof in Oslo. A photograph returned to the person who appears in it. A designer wondering what happens to objects after we stop wanting them.
A Bag of Stories moves between travel, photography, materials, food, work, design, and everyday life because these things rarely exist separately in the real world. If you have just arrived, here are a few ways in.
Travel as a way of meeting the world
Travel changes very little if we carry all our certainties with us. The stories in Journeys are interested not simply in where we go, but in what happens when we allow a place to complicate what we thought we knew. They explore movement, encounter, attention, hospitality, and the sometimes uncomfortable distance between visiting somewhere and understanding it.
Start with Echoes of Ancestral Winds, Yacciry Ahuja Jiménez's reflection on travel through an Indigenous Mexican understanding of land and belonging.
Or travel north, to Oslo, where architecture offers another question: what happens when a monumental public building invites people not simply to enter it, but to walk across it?
Follow the materials
Objects have biographies. Raffia was a plant before it became a fiber. Leather belonged to an animal before it reached a workshop. Clay comes from somewhere. A coffee pot carries knowledge far beyond the hands that shape it.
In Hands & Materials and Objects That Travel, we follow things backward: toward landscapes, makers, techniques, economies, histories, and the choices hidden inside apparently simple objects.
Read Madagascar Raffia: What a Leaf Remembers to follow a material toward its origins.
Continue with our story about zebu leather and by-product logic, where questions about animals, agriculture, waste, and local economic value converge.
Or enter the Ensira Pottery Center in Addis Ababa, where women make the jabana while children play among clay, kilns, finished pots, and the occasional broken one.
Everyday life is culture
Culture does not exist only in monuments, museums, ceremonies, or things preserved for visitors.
It is also kneaded, poured, cleaned, cooked, repaired, repeated, argued over, passed from one person to another. Our continuing series on Ethiopian culture begins from this premise.
In one story, teff is cleaned and sifted before it becomes injera. In another, clay becomes the vessel at the center of Ethiopian coffee culture. Small gestures reveal larger systems of knowledge.
This is one of the principles running throughout A Bag of Stories: ordinary life deserves the same attention we often reserve for the spectacular.
People building futures where they live
Not every important form of change arrives through large institutions. Sometimes it begins inside a cooperative, a workshop, a company, a neighborhood, a school, or an informal economy that allows someone to earn, experiment, employ others, or remain where they belong.
Local Futures looks at these systems without romanticizing them. Good Companies examines businesses that try to measure success through something broader than revenue alone.
You might begin with Camilla Garelli and Tecla, where ceramics becomes a way of thinking about the social lives of objects.
Or meet Guadalupe Álvarez and Penzi Weddings & Events in Mexico, where the economy surrounding luxury celebrations intersects with employment, Indigenous craftsmanship, internal welfare, and local relationships.
These are not stories about heroes coming to save communities. They are stories about people creating possibilities from within them.
How do we look at other people?
Photography can preserve memory. It can create understanding. It can also simplify, expose, stereotype, aestheticize, or remove a person from the context that gives an image meaning.
The Ethics of Looking is our continuing investigation into these contradictions. It asks practical questions. What does consent really mean? When is permission insufficient? How do we photograph poverty without making poverty a person's identity?
What happens when a beautiful photograph is made from someone else's hardship? What responsibility does a photographer have after publication? And when is the most ethical photograph the one we decide not to take?
The series grows from decades of documentary practice at Ayzoh! and is developed within A Bag of Stories as part of the wider collaboration between Ayzoh! and AFAR.
It is also moving beyond the magazine through public conversations, exhibitions, and other forms of encounter. Because looking is not only a photographic problem.
Anyone who travels looks. Anyone who publishes looks. Anyone who scrolls through a feed looks. The question is what kind of relationship our looking creates.
Explore The Ethics of Looking →
Meet the people behind the stories
A Bag of Stories is made by photographers, writers, designers, researchers, makers, entrepreneurs, friends, and people whose knowledge begins long before we arrive with a camera or notebook.
Some are part of AFAR or Ayzoh!. Others enter these pages because a relationship, collaboration, or encounter has grown over time.
Meet photographer and linguist Giulia Zhang, whose work moves between images and languages.
Read about designers, craftspeople, researchers, entrepreneurs, community leaders, and others whose work helps us ask better questions about the world we share.
We are less interested in collecting remarkable characters than in understanding the relationships that make their work possible.
Meet our contributors and friends →
Tell us where we should go next
Is there a story you think we should follow? A person, place, material, question, or project we should know about? Would you like to collaborate, invite us somewhere, or simply continue a conversation started on these pages?