Beyond the Image: Whose Story Are We Selling?

By Black Jebena

For many years before Black Jebena, our lives were dedicated to working with some of the most vulnerable children and communities in Ethiopia. We both come from backgrounds in communication, photography, filmmaking, and visual storytelling. We understand the power of an image, and how profoundly it can shape the way people are perceived.

During those years, we saw how images of suffering were often used to raise funds. We made a conscious decision not to follow that path. We did not want to reduce people to their circumstances or present their lives only through the difficulties they faced. We wanted to tell stories rooted in dignity, progress, and possibility.

That experience has stayed with us.

Imagine someone arriving at your workplace, taking a photograph of you—or of your children—and displaying it halfway around the world to help sell a product. Would you know where that image had gone? Would you have agreed to its use? Would anyone have even asked?

The discomfort is easy to understand when we imagine ourselves, or our families, on the other side of the camera.

Today, working in specialty coffee, we find ourselves asking a similar question:

What exactly are we selling when we sell coffee from Ethiopia?

Specialty coffee has often looked to wine for inspiration. We talk about terroir, varieties, processing methods, and tasting notes. We invite people to appreciate the complexity of coffee much as they would a good bottle of wine.

But think about the last bottle of wine you bought. Did you need to see a photograph of the person who picked the grapes to believe in its quality or authenticity?

Wine certainly celebrates producers, families, and regions, but a worker's face is not usually treated as proof that the product is genuine.

In specialty coffee, though, photographs of people at origin can become part of the language of authenticity.

Sometimes those images tell meaningful stories. Sometimes they raise questions that deserve more attention: Who chose the photograph? What did the person pictured understand about how it would be used? And who benefits when that image helps sell a bag of coffee?

This matters especially in Ethiopia, where much of the coffee is grown by smallholder families who deliver cherries to washing stations. There, coffee from many growers is processed together.

A single lot may reflect the work of dozens or even hundreds of families, alongside the people who sort, wash, dry, transport, and prepare the coffee.

Single-farm coffees do exist in Ethiopia, but they are not the whole story—and often not the most representative one.

Ethiopian coffee cannot always be reduced to a single face or a single farm. Its story is frequently collective.

At Black Jebena, we have chosen not to center our coffee around photographs of people at origin unless they have knowingly agreed to that specific use.

This is not about withholding information or denying anyone recognition.

Quite the opposite.

Farmers and everyone along the production chain are not marketing material. Their knowledge and labor deserve respect, and their stories belong to them.

Consent matters, but so do context and value.

When someone's likeness or personal story helps a business sell its products, it is fair to ask whether that person had a real choice, understood the intended use, and shared in the value created.

Those questions become even more important when children appear in the photographs.

A beautiful image is not, by itself, evidence of an ethical relationship.

Traceability matters to us. It helps us understand the coffee's origins, its quality, the people and processes behind it, and the route it takes to reach us.

But traceability tells us where coffee comes from; it does not automatically give us the right to tell someone else's story.

Transparency should work in both directions.

Ethiopia is not a distant origin on a label for us. It is our family, our history, and our lives.

That connection makes us more careful, not less, about how we tell stories.

We can speak openly about a coffee's region, processing, quality, and the communities involved without turning the people behind it into a branding device.

We do not believe people should be invisible. We believe recognition should come with respect for their choices.

The question is not whether their stories matter; it is who gets to tell them, on what terms, and for whose benefit.

That is the responsibility we want to hold ourselves to at Black Jebena.