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At our recent PRINT Book Club, hosts Debbie Millman and Steven Heller welcomed illustrator/designer Craig Frazier and photographer/director Craig Cutler to discuss their yearlong collaboration built on a simple premise: one word per week for 52 weeks. No art direction. No conversation. No peeking. Just a prompt, a deadline, and two independent responses—one drawing, one photograph.
The project began after Frazier hired Cutler for a winery shoot. Cutler’s still lifes—elegant arrangements of bottles and ceramics—sparked something. Frazier began sketching one of the unused images every morning, exploring how many ways a single subject could be interpreted. When Cutler saw the drawings, the two realized they had the beginnings of a larger experiment.
Each week, a word was drawn at random. They worked separately, often racing each other to finish. Frazier limited himself to small sketchbooks and no digital tools beyond scanning. Cutler, working solo in his studio, sourced inexpensive props and sketched concepts before shooting. The emphasis wasn’t polish—it was ideas.
The Word: Green
Early on, the exchange felt like circling prizefighters. But about ten words in, both artists stopped reaching for the obvious. That’s when the work deepened. A prompt like “Glass” led to Cutler’s luminous photograph and Frazier’s minimal line drawing with a subtle break defining fragility. “Quiet” produced a haunting image of extinguished church candles from Cutler’s childhood memories, paired with Frazier’s stark “pin drop.” “Fruit” amusingly led both to lemons. “Thick” resulted in two different honey interpretations—one poured onto a mirror, the other carefully drawn from life.
The magic wasn’t in agreement; it was in contrast. Meaning expanded in the space between the images. There were no revisions, no vetoes—once posted, they moved on. The discipline of weekly deadlines left no time for overthinking.
The project eventually became a book, published by Goff Books, designed so readers encounter the images first and discover the prompts later. In a fitting twist, the two collaborators completed nearly the entire project without meeting in person.
Asked what they learned, Frazier offered the clearest takeaway: not knowing is the point. The experiment didn’t eliminate uncertainty—it made them more comfortable working inside it. Their next collaboration, Project 2: Dialog, shifts from one-word prompts to a left-to-right chain of responses, where each image becomes the next artist’s starting point. The duel continues—and so does the conversation.
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