This useful collection includes over a century of the very best writing on photography. Vicki Goldberg has brought together more than 75 essays and excerpts that cover a vast and provocative range of topics. We have the first-hand accounts of photographers, from Fox Talbot to Alfred Stieglitz to Ansel Adams, and the thoughts of leading critics and philosophers, from Baudelaire to George Bernard Shaw to Susan Sontag. Some of the pieces illuminate important aspects of photographic history; others give unique insights in particular photographers; and some are just for fun. Together, they offer a lively approach to the history, art, and philosophy of photography.

A leading voice in the field of photography criticism, Vicki Goldberg is well known for her cogent and perceptive writing. Aperture is pleased to release in paperback Light Matters, a selection of this remarkable author’s essays and criticism culled from the past twenty-five years. 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 de!ly negotiating the many diverging paths photography now fol lows, 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.

This useful collection includes over a century of the very best writing on photography. Vicki Goldberg has brought together more than 75 essays and excerpts that cover a vast and provocative range of topics. We have the first-hand accounts of photographers, from Fox Talbot to Alfred Stieglitz to Ansel Adams, and the thoughts of leading critics and philosophers, from Baudelaire to George Bernard Shaw to Susan Sontag. Some of the pieces illuminate important aspects of photographic history; others give unique insights in particular photographers; and some are just for fun. Together, they offer a lively approach to the history, art, and philosophy of photography.

A leading voice in the field of photography criticism, Vicki Goldberg is well known for her cogent and perceptive writing. Aperture is pleased to release in paperback Light Matters, a selection of this remarkable author’s essays and criticism culled from the past twenty-five years. 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 de!ly negotiating the many diverging paths photography now fol lows, 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.