C R Stecyk IIIC.R. Stecyk III grew up in the Venice and Santa Monica areas of Los Angeles surrounded by ""car culture,"" as well as legendary surfers and board builders. His influences range from George Barris, ""Big Daddy"" Roth, and Von Dutch Howard to Dave Swee, Dale Velzy, Miklos Dora and Greg Noll.

Stecyk was involved with the founding of the Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions surf shop in Santa Monica, California. He began documenting the Dogtown scene in the mid 1970s and is perhaps best known as a documentary photographer, although he is also a writer, film maker, artist, and curator. His artwork has been shown internationally in museums such as MOCA in Los Angeles, CA; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; Fondazione La Triennale, Milan, Italy; Le Tri Postal, Lille, France; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; and La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain.

In 1993, he curated the highly successful exhibition, Kustom Kulture, at the Laguna Art Museum, which featured such seminal underground artists as Robert Williams, Von Dutch and Roth. Stecyk also organized Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing, was a founding member of the Juxtapoz magazine collective, and was the production designer and writer of the Sundance Film Festival award-winning 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. Read More Read Less