Thirty Years in a New Light

The Leopold Bachmann Foundation has spent three decades funding education and proactivity, helping people build skills, livelihoods and independence in the regions where it works. Its 30th year was the moment to rethink how it presents that work – a new visual identity, a new website, and a visual language that matches what the foundation actually believes about the people it supports.

The creative brief was unusually clear about that. It asked for people learning, creating, collaborating, leading, building, portrayed with dignity and agency, as active participants in their own lives rather than as recipients. And it asked for something else that briefs rarely request: quiet moments. Light, water, stone, trees, texture. The surroundings that give a person a place, and in the case of the Swiss imagery, photographs that signify the foundation’s own roots and identity.

Four projects were selected, each from a different region the foundation works in:

• Colombia – regional networks of seed keepers, supported via Swissaid across ten departments, where community seed banks strengthen the food security of farming families.
• India – an education and vocational training programme run on the ground by Jesuits Worldwide, giving children and young people the practical and creative skills to shape their own futures.
• Switzerland – the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) in Frick, Aargau, a leading centre for research and advice on organic farming, as well as one of its projects at Alp Peil, Vaslertal.
• Zimbabwe – the Young Africa Skills Builder programme at the Young Africa Skills Centre in Chitungwiza, which tackles youth unemployment through vocational training.

Four productions, four countries, one website launch to hit.

What kept them coherent was not central control but a shared starting point: Leopold Bachmann Foundation’s moodboard gave all four photographers the same visual reference, while each of them decided for themselves how to answer it in their own context. In Colombia, that meant coordinating closely with Swissaid's local facilitators in Cauca and Valle del Cauca, where access depends on knowing the ground. In Zimbabwe, it meant two days inside the workshops and classrooms of a skills centre. In Switzerland, a working alp high above Vals, goats included. In India, the classrooms of a Jesuits Worldwide school, down to the art lesson where pupils draw maps by hand.

The result is a photo library the foundation owns and can keep using: several hundred images across four countries, with informed consent documented for every person depicted. They now carry the foundation's new website, which went live in summer 2026, and run through its wider communication work.

For us, the project confirmed something we keep relearning. A rebrand is exactly the moment an organisation decides what it wants to look like. And that is the moment worth spending on real photographs of real people, made by photographers who live where the work happens.