Joachim Schmeisser worked for more than 35 years as a professional photographer, creating campaigns for international brands and institutions. In 2009 he began a long-term collaboration with the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya and became the first to document its orphaned elephant project extensively. His portraits of endangered African wildlife won the Hasselblad Masters Award in 2012, and his photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world.
Two books with teNeues Verlag came from his wildlife work: Elephants in Heaven (2017) and Last of Their Kind (2021, 224 pages, 111 black-and-white photographs). He has also made multi-part, large-format platinum prints, and a recent series called Side Effects, built from discarded fragments of exposed colour film.
