Visual storytelling for a Cool World – CCN to collaborate with Panos Pictures

Our Cool World conference next week will feature a photo exhibition with work by our first cohort of students to complete our Visual Storytelling Course in Africa.

The exhibition will also launch our collaboration with Panos Pictures. As a key addition to the Clean Cooling Network is the creation of the Clean Cooling Image Database - a curated, open-access image library dedicated to cold-chain-related topics in diverse contexts. It will provide a powerful evidence-base for media, researchers, scholars, writers, campaigners, policymakers and others. It will also provide a direct outlet to customers for our graduate photographers.

"This exhibition represents the output of a curriculum that empowered Rwandan and Kenyan students to use photography not just for documentation, but as a powerful tool in media advocacy. The focus is on providing course participants with the insights needed to visualise stories linked to cold-chains and clean cooling. In agri-food systems, where much of the process remains invisible to the public eye, visual imagery makes the hidden visible and the complex understandable. It is a unique approach to teaching aspiring photographers to become specialists in this specific field of work." - Chris de Bode, Visual Imagery Director at CCN/ACES.

Through both online and in-person lectures, and assignments undertaken in the field, students learned to recognise what should be present in a functioning cold-chain system - such as cooled storage, insulated vehicles, and temperature monitoring - to ensure food loss is reduced and value is added to the products of farmers, growers, fishers and manufacturers. Crucially, they’re taught to identify when things go wrong. Showing food spoilage, hygiene breaches, and related poverty is also part of the job. They also are taught on best practices including hygienic practices around food management in the cold-chain.

Added de Bode, "The course goes far beyond technical training. Students learn how to visualise compelling narratives, compose images with purpose, highlight urgent issues, and use their work to access various media platforms, engage communities, and influence decision-makers. It trains students to use imagery as a strategic communication tool and the pictures in this exhibition bear testimony to the outcome of that learning.

By the end of this first delivery of the course, our founding cohort of students didn't just know how to take a picture - they had learned how to use it. To understand what they’re seeing, why it matters, and how to present it in ways that spark dialogue, action, and change."

Now through the partnership with Panos Pictures, the Clean Cooling Image Database will serve as a dedicated professional asset for sharing images with external clients, stakeholders, and the media. The collaboration with Panos Pictures will give our photographers direct access to media outlets around the globe. The database will go live in November.

Talking about the collaboration, Panos Pictures Director, Adrian Evans, added, "We are delighted to be partnering with the CCN on their Clean Cooling Image Database project. At Panos Pictures we have always believed in the power of visual narratives to engage audiences and effect change especially when shining a light on complex and poorly understood issues."

He added, "CCN’s initiative will help build capacity in the photography communities in Rwanda and Kenya and empower the students to ask the right questions to tell the stories of cold-chain in their own countries. We look forward to sharing their work with our media partners and to raising awareness of the importance of cold-chain in our increasingly overheated world."