Light Matters by Vicki Goldberg is a selection of this remarkable author’s essays and criticism on photography culled from the past twenty-five years. Goldberg is a leading voice in the field of photography criticism well known for her cogent and perceptive writing. Aperture is pleased to release Light Matters in paperback to make this essential volume accessible to students and scholars everywhere.

Goldberg’s take on photography is both insightful and expansive: her subjects range from pop icons to the imagery of death, from the commercial use of journalistic images to the onslaught of sexual content in art photography. She casts new light on the work of the medium’s masters, including Evans, Brassaï, and Arbus, while writing with equal acuity about contemporary trailblazers such as Eleanor Antin and Martin Parr.

Dismissing clichés and deftly negotiating the many diverging paths photography now follows, Goldberg demonstrates how to consider not just photographic images themselves, but their impact. Light Matters showcases a writer of great intelligence, wit, and insight, whose understanding of this multifarious and evolving medium is unsurpassed.

Vicki Goldberg is the author of numerous texts, including The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (1991). In 1997, she received the International Center of Photography’s prestigious Infinity Award. Goldberg lectures widely and writes for Aperture magazine and the New York Times, among other publications.

248 pages, 27 halftone images

Paperback