Erickson Productions: Photography--USA

Graphis, May/Jun 2001 by Porciello, Michael

Jim Erickson, the eponym of Erickson Productions, began his career as a staff photographer at North Carolina's Raleigh News and Observer. He soon became disillusioned with the media and how they treated photography. "It felt cheap to me," he says.

Erickson wanted to continue creating evocative images without resorting to the same sensationalistic manner-on which the press often relies-so he opened Erickson Productions, where he and his small staff have worked for the past 20 years. Most of the work they do consists of portraits; they've recently finished Mother, a self-published book "on the divinity of motherhood," and Erickson has begun to shoot for his next project, focusing on the denizens of San Francisco's legendary Haight Street.

While such projects have allowed Erickson to create the kind of honest, emotional but subdued images that he desired, one of the unfortunate truths many photographers face is that they can't live on personal work alone. Erickson's commercial work-commissioned by such agencies as Goodby Silverstein & Partners, The Mullen Agency, Weiden & Kennedy and The Martin Agency for clients that include Hewlett Packard, L.L. Bean, Timberland, United Airlines and Audi-takes a strikingly different path. Catalogued in two distinct portfolios, it is easy to distinguish Erickson's personal work from his commercial work-the latter seems more predictable. But both have received recognition, winning awards from Print, Communication Arts, American Photography and Graphis, among others.

Erickson's studio emphasizes production work because, he explains, much of advertising is production: "getting the right place and the right people, as well as the right picture." A big part of this work is done on a computer, which, he says, "has freed me to work in an old-fashioned way." In a rare instance where new technology has allowed an artist to recapture the lost effects of old technologies, Erickson uses the computer the same way his precursors used the darkroom, to subtly manipulate the images. Rather than warp and skew an image, or juxtapose pictures from different sources, Erickson will subtly manipulate the image-shot with an old, large-format camera-changing the sky, for example, until it is the perfect hue, or texturing a sepia tone to make a picture look like a print from the '30s. These techniques, applied to images like those in Mother or the Haight Street series gives the work a timeless quality that few of his peers can boast. - Michael Porciello