"This is gorgeous writing. Not just succinct, it is profound. In half a paragraph, Ms. Goldberg has explained one of the most difficult issues critics must deal with, and it is necessary to note in savoring it that there is no learned jargon, no platitudinous cant: She can make this complex thought clear to her readers because it is clear to her, and because she is confident they can get it." -The New York Sun
"One of photography's most revered and beloved critics, Goldberg examines both the history of photography and our current state of affairs with curiosity, wit, and cutting insight." - Photo-Eye
"As a critic, Vicki Goldberg has overseen photography's rise in contemporary art over the past 25 years and Aperture has collectected appearances of her colourful prose into a feisty little book. Goldberg has no patience for the moneyed glam that now shapes the commercial scene. In her profiles and essays she asks us again and again to remember quality over success. It makes for a spirited historoy of the last quarter century."
- Canadian Art
"Few writers on photography can match the wit and authority of Vicki Goldberg. LIGHT MATTERS, a collection that brings together 25 years of essays and reviews, is full of sparkling tidbits: 'Photography's invention was peculiarly timely, occurring as it did just as the human life span was expanding and the prospect of an afterlife shrinking.'" - V & A Magazine (Victoria & Albert Museum)
THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY: HOW PHOTOGRAPHS CHANGED OUR LIVES (Abbeville, 1991), was named one of the best academic books of the year by the American Library Association: brief essays on photographs that can be shown to have influenced wars, elections, social reform, the creation of celebrity and more, from Mathew Brady's first photograph of Lincoln -- the first photograph ever to influence an election anywhere -- to the man who stopped the tank in Tiananmen Square -- a photograph that was also widely shown in China but interpreted differently than it was in the West.
