Since 1966, Joachim Giesel has worked as a freelance photographer with a focus on photojournalism, fashion and advertising photography. In over fifty years of work, a collection of diverse elaborate, commercial photographs was created in cooperation with companies such as Erdmann, Rossmann, Pelikan, Sunozon or Telefunken with soccer legend Gerd Müller (1945-2021).
For his advertising and fashion shots, Giesel also repeatedly staged scenarios whose dramatic image composition is reminiscent of film stills from screen classics. Illuminated by a frontal light source, a woman declines in a lascivious pose on a calfskin blanket. In the dark background, the round headlights of an airplane runway shine in a staggered manner.
Meanwhile, the black contour of a plane taking off is silhouetted against the glowing orange of the evening sky. Giesel succeeds in creating an exciting atmosphere by dividing the square photograph into three light zones. The wanderlust awakened by the sight of the photograph could make one forget that it is an advertisement for fur blankets.
Another photograph captures a moment that inevitably evokes associations with Hollywood greats of the 1960s and 1970s. Looking through the rainy glass of a car window is a woman in a black hat and matching makeup. She rests her chin lightly on her ringed hand, between whose fingers she holds a smoldering cigarette stick. On her wrist shimmers the matching bracelet. The blue-tinted shot is color-coordinated with the advertised jewelry. Looking at it, we think of Audrey Hepburn smoking inside a car while it rains on New York’s streets in the famous movie scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or Romy Schneider on the movie cover of The Swimming Pool.
That Giesel’s fashion and advertising photographs attracted international attention, even at the time of their creation, is shown by a work that graced the cover of the 1976 Photography Year Book. In a mysterious, half-opened cardboard box, a mask-like, surreal woman’s face with closed eyes emerges from between the filling wool.