Preview our FALL 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
APERTURE
Light Matters
By Vicki Goldberg.
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. First published in 2005, Light Matters gathers a selection of this remarkable author's essays and criticism, culled from her writings published over the previous 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. 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 books, including The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (1991). In 1997, she received the International Center of Photography's prestigious Infinity Award.
FROM THE BOOK
"Martin Parr is the emperor of bad taste…Parr is at once the most successful and most controversial photographer in Britain…Henri Cartier-Bresson reportedly said, when Magnum was considering him, that Parr was from 'a different solar system'…In Parr's photographs, garbage is taking over the world and people are crammed into the remaining space, babies play in brackish water, perfectly nice children have a rabies froth of food on their mouths, and their unhappy older sibs jostle each other at ice-cream counters…Parr is a dry cultural observer of the underobserved culture: people loading up on beer and toilet paper in big-box stores, bored couples in restaurants (including himself and his wife). Boredom so interests him he did a whole series of pictures in a town called Boring, Oregon, where the signs say things like 'Boring Sewage Treatment Facility,' and he collects what he calls 'boring postcards,' which live up to their name…Parr’s view of life is not likeable but bitingly funny if you're certain you're not the one being bitten, and it is wise in its scurrilous way. There is sufficient energy in these pictures to electrify a third-world country, sufficient irony to electrify an entire university department of literature, sufficient humor for a late-night comic, and sufficient grease and kitsch, garbage, sunburn, and gaucherie to fluster anyone caught laughing at the cupcakes, tchotchkes, and foibles of our world."
FORMAT: Pbk, 5.5 x 8.5 in. / 248 pgs / 27 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $19.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $25 ISBN: 9781597111652 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 11/30/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
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. First published in 2005, Light Matters gathers a selection of this remarkable author's essays and criticism, culled from her writings published over the previous 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. 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 books, including The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (1991). In 1997, she received the International Center of Photography's prestigious Infinity Award.
