Soccer played a major role in the Giesel family. Since the age of six Joachim Giesel played soccer and since 1951 for SV Arminia Hannover in the Oberliga-Nord (the highest league until the introduction of the Bundesliga in 1963).
It was also soccer that laid the foundation for Giesel’s career as a press photographer. Six photographs he took at the 1954 international match between Germany and the USSR at the Niedersachsenstadion were published in the youth magazine Rasselbande. Giesel appeared as a selector on the Lower Saxony youth team in the pre-match against Hamburg and then remained on the field side with his Voigtländer Bessa next to the press photographers.
Years later, Giesel was back on the sidelines. 1966, for example, he was commissioned by the soccer magazine Kicker to photograph captain Uwe Seeler tossing coins with the Yugoslav captain in front of 75,000 spectators at the Niedersachsenstadion.
In 1969, Giesel photographed the player portraits of the German national team for the Bergmann Verlag publishing house in Unna, which were used for the very successful soccer stickers and collector’s albums. The Bergmann Verlag still held the exclusive rights until 1979, when it came to a cooperation with the Italian company Panini, which still distributes collector’s albums on the occasion of major soccer tournaments.
Soccer greats such as Gerd Müller and Franz Beckenbauer arrived at Giesel’s studio for advertising shoots. For example, in 1969, one year before the World Cup, when Telefunken advertised their televisions with Zwei Stars für Mexico (Two Stars for Mexico), or for Pelikan’s campaign featuring soccer star Beckenbauer in order to get schoolchildren interested in ink pens.