She was recently the guest editor for PQ (published by the Center for Photography in Woodstock) and is the co-curator of emerging US photography at the inaugural Flash Forward Festival (Toronto, October 2010).

Debra has chosen Jon Spencer's Bandstand series.

SHE WRITES: "Jon Spencer's photographs of Band Stands captured my imagination from the outset. The visual depth of the images, constructed from the successive layering of photographs, provide a magical, almost whirligig vision of time and space. Yet, they are also quiet, poetic studies of an architectural structure, synonymous with the formality of the English garden and of English leisure.

"I recall countless autumnal 'leaf-kicking' walks, solitary book-reading and people-watching whilst perched on a weather-beaten bench. And yet, I can't help but wonder about the ghostly rendition of an 'other presence' - what, who, when ..."

Spencer describes the bandstands as "noble sentinels". They bear silent witness to the changing populations that inhabit the parks. This homage to history, to memory and it's intrinsic connection with photography, is insightfully played out through his use of systematic construction, that situates the solid uniformity of the band stand within the milieu of mutable activity.

He succeeds in teasing out both a collective memory of place, and a more personal memory of experience. With "Nottingham Castle", for example, I recall countless autumnal 'leaf-kicking' walks, solitary book-reading and people-watching whilst perched on a weather-beaten bench. And yet, I can't help but wonder about the ghostly rendition of an 'other presence' - what, who, when ... - the heavy weight of an 'other' is intriguing and sets one's imagination darting in all directions, but always returning to the anchor of the band stand.

Jon Spencer has created photographs that are ethereal, at once very specific and yet so universal that the connection with the viewer is multifarious. The bandstands are indeed "silent sentinels", but they also call out ever so majestically."

Debra Klomp Ching

• Klompching Gallery

The photographs Peter has chosen are from Nico Ferrando's Paper Bag series.

HE WRTES: "The tension between what is real and imagined is an over-familiar modern photographic conceit. Reality, it says, is never as real as you think it is. Most of the time such statements are a warning that what will follow - at least what will be offered for public exhibition - will be over-intellectualized. Mutton dressed as artistic lamb.

Witty is another warning word in the post-modernist canon. Except in this case Nicholas Ferrando makes you laugh out loud. The images he undermines are so familiar. Too familiar, indeed. They require the graffiti-ist's imagination to be re-newed. Make whole again. To remind us what mattered about them in the first place.

"...these images have become over-familiar. Postcards for the fridge door. And in becoming icons they have also become clichés..."

And in some cases how "real" these images are that Ferrando has borrowed is questionable in the first place. Was Capa's controversial falling soldier, which Ferrando recreates, a decisive moment of reportage or, as some have alleged, reconstructed? Then there are Arbus's twins, originally a formal and frightening portrait. Reconstructed by Ferrando they seem even more mysterious.

What is it about these images? The reality is that they have become over-familiar. Postcards for the fridge door. And in becoming icons they have also become clichés, stripped of our curiosity.

Ferrando restores them. His images succeed because we know these trophy photographs - too often discussed - that he is undermining. He strips away the imposed pomposity of over-interpretation.

You laugh because what is so familiar becomes ridiculous. The eye is drawn not to the falling soldier's face or the twins' expressions but to the paper bags which assume a life of their own.

"Everything started with one paper bag," says Ferrando, "trying to cover peoples face in a funny and ironic way. The effect of the paper bag is not to protect the models' identity but to signify to the audience that this is a stage as opposed to real life. The paper bags are more important than the individuals. They are the characters."

The bags, in the end, are like carnival masks. They emphasise what lies beneath. They refamilarise. Make new."

The photograph Diane has chosen is Willsbridge (Over The Edge) by photographer Tom Pope.

SHE WRITES: "I think it's the old couple who make it. Oblivious to the heresy stage-right, they cut a humorous figure, almost as funny as the artist himself. They need an innocent, a guileless child to pipe up and point out, "The Emperor isn't wearing any clothes". Or actually they don't so much need an innocent as to notice the one right next to them, because this is serious funny business. Tom Pope's playing the Fool, a naive but intelligent role. Fools don't play by the rules, in fact they seem incapable of it, and that's what makes them absurd. But that's what makes them visionary too. "Not all there" in this world, they have a special take on it, and were once revered for it.

In Medieval times there was an annual Feast of Fools, when peasants swapped places with their masters under the reign of the Lord of Misrule. This Lord was a kind of anti-Pope - Tom Pope is aptly named.

"...this is serious funny business. Tom Pope's playing the Fool, a naive but intelligent role. Fools don't play by the rules..."

He's disturbing the everyday peace, and it seems only appropriate he's catching himself in the act with photography, an everyday but disturbing medium. Cameras are commonplace but their effects are uncanny, freezing moments beyond the naked eye. Suspended in mid-flight Pope could almost be levitating, magically defying the laws of gravity. He could be a magician, another figure people used to take more seriously. But somehow he cuts a macabre figure. Face white against his dark hair and suit, he could be hanging from the tree, and if he's jumped up into position, he's definitely jumped too high. There's something dark and devilish at work, a Mephistopheles conjured in a sunny, leafy lane.

In Medieval times, of course, the figure of the devil was never far away. He was believed to be constantly on hand to lead us into temptation, and checked only by rigorous social, moral and religious codes - the same codes exposed at the Feast of Fools. Perhaps that's why Pope puts himself in the picture. Unlike most other photographers, he isn't just an observer. He's directly in the frame, just as we all are when it comes to constructing and maintaining everyday codes of behaviour."

JON WRITES: "For my Critic's Choice I would like to choose Kurt Tong's Christmas Tree for the simple reason that like much of Kurt's work it makes me feel simultaneously uplifted and yet forlorn. Kurt has in my opinion a real complexity to his photography but disguises it in simplicity.

I first came across Kurt thanks to Lauren Heinz who I work with at Foto8, she had put his People's Park images online for a Story of the Week on Foto8. Like his images, Kurt strikes me as a quiet person with a great deal of empathy and patience for people and place - well I suppose that's what made him a great nurse. The "Christmas Tree" in this image is not shouting out at me to notice it, the fairy lights on the roof and the chimney are making most of the noise.

"Kurt strikes me as a quiet person with a great deal of empathy and patience for people and place"

But Kurt is not ignoring the tree, or making fun of its bareness, to me at least he's noticing its indomitable spirit and acknowledging its special position in prime view of the window, kept company by a small bed of purple flowers at its base. It's a Kurt Tong image all over, harking to better times when the lights were on and the branches full and green but even now Kurt makes me feel joy in this genuine admiration for a tree."

Jon Levy

• 8 Magazine
• Foto8 website

ROGER WRITES: "There is something about men and sheds. It's a bit like men and the sea. There's a natural affinity there. Men love sheds. They want to build sheds. Anything from a D.I.Y store's cut-price, paper-thin tongue-and-groove offering to a proper allotment lash-up, made from anything and everything. Bits of old skirting board, chicken wire, Edwardian panelled doors - the lot. The allotment confection route was favoured by the builders of the erections that are the subjects of Jan Stradtmann's photographs.

"There's a natural affinity there. Men love sheds. They want to build sheds."

I think these pictures are all at once funny, sad and disturbing. I should say straight away that I'm glad he took them - just to record their existence is important in this rapidly changing capital city that does not leave much room for the individual. Allotments, like parks, let the city and its citizen's breath. Looking at them made me smile for all the above reasons and of course I love a shed myself. Constructing one brings back those heady, multi-coloured Lego brick days of childhood. Building something three-dimensional is so life-affirming compared with working in a computerised 2D world. There is also something comforting about being inside a shed - warm and womb-like - a retreat.

The sadness comes from the striving for perfection by the builders (the hinged door with a handle, glazed windows), forensically recorded here, and the ultimate failure to outlast the weeds and impending developers.

The photographs are disturbing in the way the sheds are photographed at night, on a kind of wasteland with all that implies. Manor Gardens seems a very lonely place after dark. And what awaits inside? Why is the door ajar? And most chillingly - why is there a curtain at the window? Perhaps after all it is the very the connection with men that is the most distressing aspect of the images of these abject hovels."

Roger Tooth

LOUISE WRITES: "Benjamin's flâneur is a response to a world in which sense is dejected, scattered, crystallized in detail. The flâneur is the collector and connoisseur of detail. He is a sensibility as opposed to intelligence. His highest aspiration is to become a medium, a precipitate in which the scattered particles of sense can reconstitute themselves. The original whole... has been shattered, by time, by history, by the hubris of progress; the flâneur, by drawing together bits and pieces from the rubble, can discover its echo. The flâneur is, thus, dedicated to the surveying of space, for it is only in space, in the network of layered particulars, that the successive images of time are concretized. Space exists to take the print of time." - Sven Birkerts, "Walter Benjamin, Flâneur: A Flanerie"

Immersed in the world, Hin Chua is simultaneously absent observer and participant in the mass, applying the strategies of street photography to all areas public space. Shifting between spaces transecting the surface of the world motivated by aesthetics, composition and the intuitive disjuncture between beauty and terror, his nomadic life enables him to be responsive when encountering moments, to be a flâneur reacting to a sense of the world between the borders of culture. He plays an important role in understanding, participating in and portraying the urban landscape and its anomalies. A collector and connoisseur of detail with no specific thesis, he works with just a sense, a feeling and emotion. By his own admission Hin 'likes getting lost and making photographs'

Places and moments, however fleeting, are locked into his images he seeks moments that heighten tensions between the vernacular and pedestrian while toying with a foreboding that questions time and space. The series title the fall refers to the state of disobedience after paradise, predominantly dealing with the boarders where urban zones begin to fray. They are the confessions of a place and give us incomplete clues to the events that are mid or post action. We encounter the place post trauma where tensions and life exists within an ephemeral space, appearing and disappearing without announcement or fanfare.

Hin captures moments of solitude elevating simple elements like weeds, wire and trees from oblique insignificance to poetic relevance layered with traces of urbanity. He offers them to us as an ambitious varied approach to the issues and psychological aspects of the built environment in an attempt to relay the wonder of his encounters with the world. The individual titles of the images act more as markers that chart his journeys, it is Hin's aim that it is the image itself that communicates his feeling of estrangement rather than any textual lead. Akin to the work of Michael Lungren "They are a search to understand beauty and terror, which are bound to one utter certainty-change... Through intuition, to photograph the impossible, to fix the fugitive on film."

Louise Clements

• FORMAT began in 2004 and is one of the UK's leading contemporary photography festvals. The next FORMAT will take place in Derby, UK, March 2011.
• QUAD is a new visual arts and media centre in Derby offering galleries, an independent cinema, artist studios, digital and physical production spaces and a BFI Mediatheque.
• Hin's full series can be seen here.