2025 National Competition
Juror, Jean Dykstra

July 2 – July 20, 2025

Juror’s Statement from Jean Dykstra

It was both a pleasure and a challenge to serve as the juror for this year’s Soho Photo National Photography Competition. So many beautiful, tender, revelatory photographs; so many different visions of what photography is. Any critic or curator has her own predilections and preferences, and part of the joy of being a juror is to check them, with intention, to appreciate all of the languages and processes and approaches available in this capacious medium. Some photographers reached back into the medium’s history, others leaned forward to embrace new technologies, some engaged in abstraction, others embraced the long history of portraiture or street photography. But all of the photographers in this exhibition have committed to the expansive possibilities of the medium and to showing all of us a new way of looking at the world, or – for that matter – new ways to think about looking.