A review of the Jim Erickson talk hosted by the APA- the multimedia future?

Last Thursday, the APA hosted Jim Erickson and his digital production company, Fat Cat Digital in San Francisco. As many of you know, John Lodato has been predicting the evolution of the high-end commercial photographer's role into that of the image conceptualizer, rather than the "picture taker".

But could this be true? A photographer that doesn't necessarily take the picture? What do you call a "photographer" at that point? 

Erickson's method is very forward-thinking and raises interesting  questions about the nature of modern commercial photography. (For more on this topic see this interesting post by Vincent LaFloret) 

Example 1: When doing a commercial assignment, Jim uses multiple shooters throughout the project. Everyone, from the assistants to the art directors, may all be shooting at any one time. This means that the final image chosen by the client is not necessarily the image shot by Erickson. He says he borrowed the method from the film industry, using multiple vantage points to catch and replay the same moment, artistically increasing the number of perspectives and pragmatically increasing the chances of getting the perfect image for the client.

Example 2: A recent month-long stock production trip in China included a team of eight pro-shooters brought on as work-for-hire. All 150,000 images, from everyone that shot on the trip, are owned by Erickson Productions. This huge catalog was then culled down by his stock-workflow team to 1500 images that were added to the Erickson Stock portfolio. The degree of Jim's direct involvement in the final editing was unclear, but it is safe to assume that his stock team did the brunt of the work using his brand-of-imagery as a guide. His stock imagery is made directly available via the web.

Example 3:  Through Fat Cat Digital, Erickson has moved into video and multimedia productions for the web. One recent example of this work is the website of Palmetto-Bluff, a high-end real estate development in North Carolina. When I say website, I mean the WHOLE site: the design and all of its content. This includes, design video, stills, music, etc. His own website embraces this same multimedia format.

Conclusion

Through his adoption of the film industry model for image creation, Jim Erickson transcends the role of the traditional photographer and embraces a collaborative creative environment. Focusing his next stage of business growth on multimedia productions, he is taking a risk that could pay off handsomely. Will the still image be enough in the next stage of evolution? Will the sole photographer working alone seem as old-fashioned as shooting film?