Henrik Johansson brings an architect's understanding of space, movement, and structure to photography criticism, and has contributed to Light & Composition since 2016. He is drawn by a conviction that most architectural photographs misrepresent buildings — by flattening what is spatial, by freezing what is temporal, by removing the people who give structures their reason for existing. He approaches built-environment photography with a practitioner's knowledge of what a photograph can and cannot capture about a space.

Architecture exists in time and movement. A building is not a single view — it is a sequence of experiences. The architectural photograph is always a lie of convenience. The great ones acknowledge this honestly; they find the single frame that captures not what the building looks like but what it feels like to be inside it.

Eleanor Voss has contributed to Light & Composition since 2011. A committed formalist, she believes that a photograph's enduring power lies almost entirely in the rigour of its visual architecture — the placement of mass, the tension of negative space, the discipline of the frame. She has little patience for sentiment without structure.

A photograph earns its place through formal rigour alone. Emotion without structure is noise. The frame either holds or it doesn't.

Marcus Trent brings a photojournalist's intolerance for artifice and his deep conviction that every worthwhile photograph is ultimately about a human being — either because a human being is in it, or because a human being felt something extraordinary in the moment they pressed the shutter. He has been reviewing for Light & Composition since 2015.

Photography is a human act before it is an aesthetic one. The question I ask every image: did the person behind the camera feel something true? If they did, the camera finds a way to carry it.

Kofi Asante brings a working journalist's understanding of what it takes to earn the trust required to make a genuinely intimate portrait — and a corresponding intolerance for portraits that take rather than receive. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2018.

The best portrait is a gift, not a capture. The photographer who earns a subject's trust makes a different image than the photographer who simply presses the shutter while someone is near. You can see the difference. It lives in the eyes. It lives in the hands.

Sophie Delacroix approaches photography criticism through the lens of perceptual psychology. She has been with Light & Composition since 2013. Her criticism focuses not on what is in the image but on what the image does — the sequence of emotional and cognitive responses it triggers in a viewer who has never seen it before and the one who returns to it a year later.

The photograph is not the thing in the frame. The photograph is what happens in the body of the person looking at it. A great image alters the viewer's physiology — pulse, breath, the specific sadness of a certain blue.

Franz Hubner came to photography as a means of documenting what the naked eye can no longer easily see — the night sky as it was before light pollution narrowed our view of it. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2020 and brings a cosmologist's sense of scale — the ability to see a photograph of a star-filled sky as a document of light that has been travelling for millions of years to arrive at a sensor in this particular photographer's hands.

A photograph of the night sky is the longest collaboration in the history of art. The light in the frame left its source before humans existed. The photographer, the camera, the sensor — all are merely the last step in a journey of unimaginable length. That responsibility deserves to be taken seriously.

Thomas Hargreaves brings a landscape practitioner's uncompromising standards to photography criticism. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2010 and is the panel's most demanding voice on the subject of craft — specifically the craft of waiting, of returning to the same place in different weather, of earning the photograph rather than finding it. His dry wit has made him the panel's most quoted critic and occasionally its most feared.

The best photographs are expensive. They cost the photographer time, patience, and physical discomfort. I can usually tell from the image whether someone paid full price.

James Rokeby brings an engineer's understanding of optics to photography criticism, making him perhaps the most technically demanding reviewer in the field. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2013. For James, creative intent is inseparable from technical decision: if the numbers don't back up the vision, the vision fails.

Every creative decision leaves a trace in the EXIF data. Aperture, shutter, ISO — these are not settings, they are arguments. Bad technical choices cannot be rescued by good subjects.

Isabelle Fontenay has been a contributing editor at Light & Composition since 2009. Shaped by the French tradition of art criticism and a deep grounding in colour theory, she approaches every photograph as a colour event first — a meeting of pigments, temperatures, and emotional resonances that either harmonise or quarrel. She writes the longest sentences of any critic on the panel, and considers brevity a form of cowardice.

Colour is not decoration. Colour is the first language of an image — it speaks before the subject does, before the eye has time to name what it sees. A photograph's emotional truth lives in its palette.

Yusuf Al-Hamdan brings a practitioner's reverence and deep patience to every review. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2011, with a particular admiration for the photograph that required patience — the one that could not have been taken by anyone who was in a hurry.

Light is not something the photographer uses. Light is something the photographer listens to. The landscape photograph is an act of attention — the shutter is pressed not when the photographer decides, but when the land is ready.

Julian Rowe has spent years pushing the boundaries of what a photograph is allowed to be — working with intentional camera movement, multiple exposure, in-camera compositing, and alternative processes including cyanotype and lumen printing. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2016 and consistently challenges the panel's assumptions about sharpness, clarity, and conventional photographic virtue. He believes the most interesting photographs are made by photographers who have understood the rules and then deliberately broken them.

Sharpness is a choice, not a virtue. The technically perfect photograph is the most conservative possible use of a camera. The photographer who understands what a blur means — who chooses imprecision as a form of precision — is doing something far more interesting than the one who merely maximises resolution.

Amara Diallo came to photography criticism through a deep conviction that every portrait is an act of storytelling — a conviction rooted in the oral traditions of West Africa, where the story is the record. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2014. For Amara, the most important question a portrait photographer can answer is: did you listen before you looked?

Before the shutter, there must be a conversation — even if it is silent. The photographer who listens to their subject before looking at them makes a different kind of portrait. You can see it in the eyes. You can feel it in the frame.

Nadia Osei is one of the most respected — and challenging — voices in photography criticism. She has contributed to Light & Composition since 2016 and has never allowed a photograph to rest comfortably in its own assumptions. Her reviews ask questions that other critics are afraid to pose.

Every photograph is an act of looking. And looking is never neutral. Who is the photographer? Who is the subject? What does the frame include, and what does it exclude, and why? These are not political questions — they are photographic ones.

Dmitri Kasakov has contributed to Light & Composition since 2010 and remains its most philosophically demanding voice — the critic most likely to cite Heidegger in a review of a beach photograph. For Dmitri, every photograph is a moral act: the choice of what to light and what to leave in darkness is never merely aesthetic.

Shadow is not the absence of light. Shadow is where the image thinks. The photographer who controls darkness controls meaning. A photograph that is afraid of its own shadows is a photograph that has nothing to say.

Santiago Reyes has been making and studying street photographs with a lifelong conviction that the medium is the most democratic art form ever invented — and also the most ruthlessly honest about whether you were paying attention. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2018.

The street gives you one chance. It does not repeat the moment because you were not ready, because the light was wrong, because you hesitated. The decisive moment is decisive because it will not wait. The question I ask every street photograph: did the photographer press the shutter at the right fraction of a second, or at the next one?