Craig Cutler
Just Keeps shooting
Commercial photographer Craig Cutler committed to making one new personal work
a week for a year. As his CC52 project wraps up, he talks to PDN about bringing his
concepts to reality, shooting film and why it’s important not to get bogged down by
your own ideas. By Meghan Ahearn
ALL PHO TOS © CRAIG CUTLER
IN EARLY 2011, commercial photographer Craig Cutler
was ready to start a new project. His 25-year career shooting commercial and editorial assignments was going strong, and he often
shot personal work. But he was looking for something different
to do. After discussing his restlessness with his agency, Stockland
Martel, its marketing team presented Cutler with a challenge—
almost a dare, he says—to shoot something new every week for a
year. They even came up with a name: CC52—“CC” for his initials;
“ 52” for the number of weeks in a year.
“I would not have suggested 52 weeks of anything to anyone
other than Craig Cutler,” says rep Maureen Martel. “But I knew he
could deliver … [because he’s] a completely dedicated, hardwork-ing, creative photographer, who produces a lot of personal work.”
Cutler accepted the challenge, put his other personal projects
on hold and started thinking about meeting CC52’s deadlines. Each
week Stockland Martel would create a blog post featuring his new
work and every four weeks one post would be included in the agency’s e-mail blast.
Cutler says he wasn’t interested in producing new portfolio
pieces. “It was never like, ‘OK I want to do this because I need to
cover this or I want to shoot glass because I want to get into this
market,” he says. “Always my concept for the whole thing was: I’m
going to do whatever I want to do that week, whatever I feel like
doing and that was it—whether it made sense or not. So the mood
kind of dictated what I shot.”
He already had a system in place to collect the numerous ideas
he would need. “I keep sketchbooks in my bag, and I’m constantly
drawing and sketching,” he says. “But when I’m sketching, I’m kind of
running the shoot through my head as I’m drawing it and at the end,
if I think it has legs then I’ll keep going.”
Many of Cutler’s sketches are included in the CC52 blog posts.
Seeing the finished work alongside the sketches is a fascinating
peek into Cutler’s creative process. For example, the sketches for
week one’s “Ice Cubes” simply show stacks of squares drawn on
paper. However, the resulting black-and-white still lifes of perfectly
square ice cubes stacked in various positions transform the melt-
ing ice cubes into blocks as dense as wood.
Or there’s week six, “Vacuum Form with Flowers.” The sketches
show flattened flower arrangements in their vases. Yet the color
images of the vacuum-sealed bouquets have an almost futuristic feel to them. Fully encased in plastic bags, the blooms are still
This page: “Maddie” from week 24’s series of portraits taken at beauty schools
across the country. Opposite: The first CC52 piece, “Ice Cubes,” shown with the
sketch Cutler used to plan out the shoot.
