Vicki Goldberg

Baudelaire, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Susan Sontag are among the writers and photographers who discuss the art, creation, function, techniques, and value of photography

Writings from 1816 to the Present

Photography in Print

Robert Silberman

This beautiful and informative photographic history includes images from 1900 to 1999. Many are often seen (bullet piercing the apple, splashing crown of milk, Sophia Loren looking askance at Jayne Mansfield's plunging decollete, and Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother); but most are probably unknown, because the photos were selected not only for their visual and cognitive qualities but also for their importance to the history and development of photographic technique and usage. The century is divided into thirds for explanation's sake, and there is at least one photograph for every year. While this is a picture book, the accompanying text provides informative introductions to the uses and abuses of perhaps the century's most important medium. The book is companion to the PBS series. Oversize: 12.5x9.5". Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

A Century of Images

American Photography

Jane Goodall

Peter Singer

Alice Sebold

Nick Brandt

On this Earth, a Shadow Falls

Vicki Goldberg, one of the leading voices in the field of photography criticism, is well known for her cogent and perceptive writing, which is regularly featured in such national publications as "The New York Times," "American Photographer" and "Vanity Fair." "Light Matters" gathers for the first time a selection of this remarkable author's essays and criticism, culled from her writings published over the past 25 years. Goldberg's take on photography is both insightful and encompassing: her subjects range from pop imagery to war journalism, from photo-booth portraits to manipulated digital imagery, from the "boredom" of voyeurism to the great preponderance of tragic photographs in the news. She brings new light to the work of the medium's "old masters," among them Walker Evans, Lotte Jacobi and Lartigue, writing with equal acuity about contemporary trailblazers such as Bill Viola, Daido Moriyama and Bastienne Schmidt. Goldberg also tackles provocative larger issues facing the medium, such as the potentially "transgressive" nature of photographs, and the camera's powerful role in a culture of commodification. 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, and the meaning of that impact. "Vicki Goldberg: Light Matters" showcases a writer of great intelligence, wit and insight, whose understanding of this multifarious and evolving medium is unsurpassed.

Writings on Photography

Light Matters

Yolanda del Amo

Staged photographs address the social constructions that define how people relate to each other.

Archipelago

Examines the influence of photographs on life in the twentieth century, discussing the significance of over one hundred images

How Photographs Changed Our Lives

The Power of Photography

Margaret Bourke-White

International Center of Photography

Bourke-White

Jimmy Katz

Leaving the bustle of the music scene of New York City where they now live and work, photographers Jimmy and Dena Katz headed out West to make a personal landscape project in and around the Salt Flats of northern Utah. Standing on the shore of the Great Salt Lake with a stark, almost surreal view stretching ahead, they came upon a trio of plastic pink flamingoes abandoned in the water. Inspired by the odd juxtaposition of the timeless and transient, they circled the lake seeking other such moments, and then pushed on to the Flats. Again and again they discovered human possessions and personal obsessions flung onto the salt surface against undulating mountains and boundless sky. They became intrigued by the inventors who, with their hand-built hotrods, racecars, and rockets, participate in the annual rituals and races on the Salt Flats--"making their own statement in the landscape. The photographs of people and object that the Katz's encountered are collected for the first time in

Salt Dreams

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.

The companion book to the PBS television series traces the role of photography in American society, from early snapshots of family members to advertising, fine art, documentary journalism, and the Internet

Profiles the pioneering photojournalist whose accomplishments included being the only foreign photographer in Moscow during the Nazi bombardment, being the first woman photographer accredited to the U.S. armed forces, and being the first to photograph the

A Biography

Keith De Lellis

La Strada

In 2001, Nick Brandt embarked on an ambitious photographic project, a trilogy of books memorializing the vanishing natural grandeur of East Africa. Focusing on some of the worlds last great populations of large mammals elephants, giraffes, lions, gorillas and their kin he created two of the new centurys most influential photographic books: On This Earth (2005) and A Shadow Falls (2009). His iconic portraits of these majestic animals express an empathy usually reserved for human subjects. The magisterial On This Earth, A Shadow Falls collects the most memorable images from Brandts first two books, along with their accompanying essays. A testament to the bookmakers craft, it is the first volume on Brandts work to capture the superb quality of his remarkable, large format prints, which are notable for their velvet blacks and tonal subtleties.

On This Earth, a Shadow Falls

Meeka Walsh

Diana Thorneycroft

Profiles photographer Diana Thorneycroft’s exhibit, The Body, Its Lesson and Camouflage, which toured eight cities from 2000 to 2002.

Vicki Goldberg

Books

Your next favorite book is out there