Why you should always work with local visual creators

New ways of storytelling

The last bigger project I executed for my former employer Fairtrade Germany was a campaign called the «Impact Diaries». 

Impact Diaries are short videos taken by cocoa farmers who bear witness to the success of a living income strategy. We hosted a workshop at the cooperative to enable the farmers to record their stories with a smartphone.

For the video documentation at the different locations in Poland, Austria and Ghana we hired a German crew I used to work with. What was missing was a professional local photographer who would accompany us in Ghana, document the whole production process and portrait the farmers. 

I have never worked with a local professional visual creator before and didn’t really know how to proceed. Luckily, I happened to hear about Fairpicture. Thanks to their smooth processes we managed to request, book and brief the Ghanaian photographer Nipah Dennis in record time and were ready to take off.

Co-create together

In April 2021, our small crew arrived safely in Accra. We met Nipah and he instantly became part of the team. Together we travelled to the village of Abekwease, where the cocoa farmers of the living income project live. We held the workshop and recorded the first Impact Diaries. Nipah was always around and documented everything with his camera like a silent observer. 

The results

Back in Germany, we continued the intensive work on the documentary as well as the website. We had two more months until the launch of the campaign. What was already waiting for us on the Fairpicture platform – carefully edited and with all consent forms in place: Nipah’s pictures. So even with our main assets – documentary and website – under construction, we already had something to show and share. 

Although I have been working for Fairtrade for more than ten years and have visited several producer countries, Nipah's creative approach was new to me. His images not only blew me away, but also made our clients, donors and colleagues very curious about what was coming soon.

Meanwhile, I made a change and started working for Fairpicture as a business developer at the beginning of 2022. Today I am much more familiar with the concept of a „fair picture“.

So let’s look at the different dimensions of visuals and apply our criteria of a „fair picture“ to Nipah’s work:

After the campaign’s success and the work with local professionals, Fairtrade Germany took the chance and ordered a follow-up mini-documentary via Fairpicture (> click on the right to start watching). 

This time nobody travelled from Germany to Ghana. With the confidence built, they put the complete responsibility for pictures and video material in the hands of Ghanaian visual creators and were once again overwhelmed by the results and the energy which did arise.