Craig Stecyk is an American artist, photographer and writer. He is mostly known for his conceptual art pieces of the 1970s and ’80s, and for documenting surfing and skateboarding culture in particularly via a series of influential articles for Skateboarder Magazine in the mid-1970s describing the innovative developments of the Z-Boys skateboarding team. Stecyk created designs for the skateboard brand Powell-Peralta, having coined the name of their team, the Bones Brigade, and produced advertizing photographs. Stecyk coined the phrase “Skate and Destroy.” Stecyk was also involved with the founding of the Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions surf shop in Santa Monica, California.

This black and white photograph is of group of skateboarders in the suburbs in New York. This gang image looks to be very grainy and raw which could suggest that this images was taken on film. This documentary style image captures these boys posing in front of the camera in the middle of the street which could suggest that they could be causing havoc whilst skating round. This would link to typical stereotypes of skateboard gangs as they are usually portrayed as causing trouble within populated areas due to skateboarding in areas where they shouldn’t. This image was taken with dull natural lighting due to the fact the the tones and shades of their surroundings are very dull and also the characters themselves. Furthermore, this image projects different races interacting with each other. The three dark skinned boys and the white boy look to be part of the same group which could possibly challenge typical stereotypes as white people usually think they are a superior race and don’t hang out with different races however it is not seen like that within this image as they look to be part of the same group. A fast shutter speed was used as within this image the subjects that have been captured are clear and are all in focus and allows for the reader to focus on more than just the main subjects at the front.

Larry Clark, born in Tulsa, worked in his family’s commercial photographic portrait business before studying photography with Walter Sheffer at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. Clark served in the military during the Vietnam War and has been a freelance photographer based in New York since 1966. During the 1960s, Clark documented the culture of drug use and illicit activity of his friends in Tulsa, and his photographs from those years were published as Tulsa in 1971. Considered shocking for its graphic portrayal of the intimate details of its subjects’ risky lives, the book launched Clark’s career. After Tulsa, he produced Teenage Lust in 1983, a series of photographs depicting adolescent sexuality and The Perfect Childhood. His work has been included in group and solo exhibitions since the early 1970s, and was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Photographers’ Fellowship in 1973 and a Creative Arts Public Service photographers’ grant in 1980. Clark has also produced films; Kids (1994), based on his experiences with New York City teenagers and their culture of drugs, alcohol, and sex.

Larry Clark’s photographs in Tulsa are unflinching and portrays a difficult and often unsightly circumstances viewed through a participant’s eyes. Their first hand intensity, recollects the work of Danny Lyon and Bruce Davidson, but Clark’s raw voyeurism and insistent exposure of detail results in a apprehensiveness that differentiates his work from that of others in the early 1970s.

Gosselin’s photography reveals friends in the act of escaping from their regular lives into newly enticing and perilous modes of existence, ever in search of the persistent though elusive idea of freedom.

Gosselin was born near Le Havre in Normandy in 1990. Enthusiastic about drawing, music, and cinema, he chose a path through the art school, and graduated in 2012 as a graphic designer in Amiens. He started photography around 2007, and it Became a passion of his. He loves to capture the simple life, love, good and bad moments, his friends and his adventures. The subjects in Théo Gosselin’s images are friends rather than models, and the situations are not mythic constructions but glimpses of an underground lifestyle in a post-9/11 world in which social media has blurred the boundaries between public and private, and between being documented and simply being. 

I chose to focus on Theo Gosselin as I saw that his work had significant relations towards my idea due to the fact that Theo’s work is taken in a documentary style way however, the images also focus on the lifestyle of the subjects throughout. The concept behind his images I believe linked towards my idea strongly too as a lot of Theo’s images are of drugs, alcohol and various other things that could easily be seen within a skateboard lifestyle. Furthermore, Theo’s image have a very raw feeling to them which gives me thorough inspiration towards the photos I want to capture as I believe having raw, gritty images have a stronger effect on the audience.