When I first heard of this show, I thought back to my first encounters with the photographers.  It wasn’t in person (as most aren’t these days) but, through the internet.  More specifically Flickr.  Life in New York can be contained to specific neighborhoods as time is never on our side, yet somehow these four seem to be everywhere all of the time.  As contemporaries of each other in a new generation of New York documentarians, they capture moments that are immediately rendered timeless and beautiful.  More deeply familiar with each others persona and work than I am of theirs, I asked Sam Horine, Jake Dobkin, Luna Park, and Street Stars to select a favorite photograph of another and explain what makes the work so good.  Luckily, being the nice folks that they are, they agreed.  After the jump words and photos from them all.

Sam Horine on Luna Park

i first stumbled into luna park’s world several years back while looking for information on wheat pastes. although i wasn’t yet aware of it with that first click, entering into her photo stream can be a dangerous endeavor. it’s easy to disappear for several hours while browsing through one of the most thorough catalogs of street art that i’ve seen. as amicable in person as she is online, luna park is one of the community’s greatest assets and i’m glad to call her a friend. no matter the weather, if a new piece goes up in new york city, it’s a sure bet that luna park will have have a shot of it within 24hrs, leaving others to wonder just how she knew where it was and when it was going to be there. luna’s keyed in, she’s bad ass and that shines through in her beautifully composed, thoroughly analytical photos of the world that lurks and winks all around us.

Luna park on Street stars

It will come as no great surprise that it was graffiti that drew me to Street Stars’ pictures. I’m not talking about colorful production pieces, but down, dirty and gritty street scenes that are relentless in their honesty. Scratch the surface and you will find much more than just bombed out walls. Street Stars portrays the entire urban landscape - from all angles - from the highline above to the freedom tunnel below. He captures fragments of city life - the people, places, and things you walk past every day - and gives us fleeting moments in time that are all the more powerful because they are real and entirely without artifice. Through beautifully composed shots rich in texture, it is a pleasure to see the world through Street Stars’ eyes.

Jake Dobkin on Sam Horine

Sam Horine has steady nerves, fast reflexes, and can run like a gazelle. Most photographers have just one or two of these qualities– but Sam has them all. I’ve seen him lounge casually in a huge pack of bloodthirsty photographers, languidly waiting to snap a picture– and yet his shot is always the one out of the multitudes that I like best. I’ve seen him lunge like a hyena out for blood to get the right angle at a concert– and his instincts always turn out to be uncannily correct. And once, when we were nearly captured by a security guard at an abandoned sugar factory, I saw him disappear into thin air– just barely glimpsing him dive headfirst to safety out of the corner of my eye. None of this would mean anything if he didn’t have his eye for memorable and disturbing scenes– every picture he takes looks like it’s from two minutes before the apocalypse. Maybe he’s good at this stuff because he’s not from around here– his work sometimes gives me the feeling that he was dropped off in a weird city in the middle of the night, and he’s just got a few seconds left before the zombies eat his brains.

Street Stars on Jake Dobkin

“in the last twenty years, information technology and the digital revolution have created a new pathway to enormous amount of data (whether it’s words, photos, or video). this freedom in capturing and sharing information has sparked a new trend, the amateur auteur. jake dobkin’s photoblog, www.bluejake.com, is a great example of that concept. more than anyone shot on the site, it’s the collection of all the images that make it compelling. the tightly composed images, both colorful and muted, build up a sensation in the viewer that you are witnessing the in-between moments of urban living: the derelict city corners, a surprising tuft of nature pushing it’s way up through mangled concrete, a solitary figure navigating through the alien-like but man-made terrain. ”

A big Thank You to Sam Horine for making this happen.  Quality of Life opens at Factory Fresh in Bushwick, Brooklyn and runs through the 31st of October.