with a little Lead Graffiti in the mix
Craig Cutler is a former student of Ray's and a renowned photographer based in New York City. In addition to his award-winning work for commercial clients, Craig regularly takes on personal exploratory photo/video projects to stay sharp. His latest effort, CC52, is a monumental personal challenge to shoot a new assignment each week for a year. And it is one of our favorites because Lead Graffiti got to contribute to Craig's project for 2 of those weeks.
In his 49th week, Craig came to shoot wood, metal, grit, and grime in Lead Graffiti for 2 days. He poked around in every dark and dusty corner of our studio, documenting all sorts of letterpress goodies: a case of antique hand-carved letters, our uncommon 96-point Caslon metal, and an incredibly lit beauty shot of our Intertype C4 hot metal linecaster.
For the grand finale celebrating week 52, Lead Graffiti contributed several parts to his film, "Words." One of those parts was a flip book using hand-inked wood type printed slowly & patiently via letterpress. Another fun part was building a word out of matches and setting it on fire.
Below are 3 of Craig's photos from his Lead Graffiti studio shoot in Newark.
Photo by Craig Cutler : 96-point Caslon X. At 20" x 24," this photo takes the term "super sized" to a whole new dimension.
Photo by Craig Cutler : Galley of lowercase Caslon. Too large for a California job case, this 96 point Caslon rests in several galleys. As you can see, it includes lots of classic ligatures.
Photo by Craig Cutler : Intertype C4 .inecaster. This is beauty and the beast in one incredible shot.
Craig was having an exhibition of the work in Manhattan and asked if there was a way we could produce a piece that would function as a keepsake. One of the remarkable things about letterpress is the ability to create projects with many pieces in small runs. Craig ran out a series of 100 prints of each of 8 images from his year's effort. We produced a folder to hold each photo in each series which were given out at the exhibition.
We printed Craig's name and project name (CC52) onto the folders which held one loose image. We could easily print just the name of the particular image and the appropriate week's number.
Turned out to be a lovely way to contribute to the work of an important person in our lives and to connect with some seriously creative imagery.
CC52 : the big ending
Craig Cutler pulled out all of the stops on the final week of his year-long personal series. Lead Graffiti’s contributions run from 1:34 - 1:46, 2:02 - 2:11, and 2:17 - 2:25 in the 3.48 film. Check it out.
Words from Stephen Meierding on Vimeo.