Vicki Goldberg, an influential photography critic and the author of a lauded 1986 biography of Margaret Bourke-White, the pioneering and colorful Life magazine photographer, died on May 29 in Manhattan. She was 88.
Her death, at an assisted living facility, was caused by brain cancer, her son Eric Goldberg said.
Though she was trained as an art historian, Ms. Goldberg began writing about photography in the 1970s, when the medium was having a renaissance after a postwar lull. At the time, said Mary Panzer, a historian of photography and an independent curator, “much of the criticism was written by men and appeared in the photography press, such as Popular Photography and Modern Photography, and was directed at professionals, hobbyists and the eccentrics who considered photography something more than a collectible.”
“Goldberg,” she added, “brought a broad education, insatiable curiosity and relentless ambition to her work. She showed us that photography was part of our social and cultural landscape.”
Ms. Goldberg had a windfall in the case of Bourke-White. In 1973, two years after the photojournalist’s death, 8,000 of her photographs and other artifacts were discovered under a stairway in her house in Darien, Conn. Bourke-White had burned most of her diaries, Ms. Goldberg told The New York Times in 1986, but had “saved everything but the Kleenex,” including menus, receipts and Time Inc. memo pads. On one pad she’d written, “Should I marry Erskine Caldwell?” (She and the novelist had a brief and stormy marriage.)
Ms. Goldberg pored over the trove for an article in New York Magazine, and soon embarked on her Bourke-White biography.
Bourke-White was America’s first female photographer to be accredited to cover World War II, a swashbuckling personage who worked for Fortune and then Life magazines. She shot Nazi rallies, and, in agonizing images, the liberation of Buchenwald. She flew in a Flying Fortress bomber to get shots of a raid on Tunis. She photographed a smug-looking Stalin. Away from the war, she perched on a gargoyle atop the Chrysler Building in Manhattan to photograph its twin and made perhaps what is the most famous portrait of Gandhi, sitting cross-legged with his spinning wheel.
Ms. Goldberg captured her contradictions. As an ambitious photojournalist, Bourke-White was wily, opportunistic and courageous, but she was also manipulative, doing whatever it took to get her shot, including crying on cue.
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Timothy Foote, a former foreign correspondent for Life magazine, called Ms. Goldberg’s biography “an intricate and provocative portrait, as revealing as fiction, part ‘Great Gatsby,’ say, part ‘I’ll Take Manhattan.’”
(The book inspired a television movie, “Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White,” which aired in 1989, starring Farrah Fawcett.)
Ms. Goldberg’s scholarship was rigorous and her knowledge expansive. Yet as a critic for The Times, where she was a regular contributor during the 1990s, her tone was light and often slightly bemused.
When Madonna’s much ballyhooed “Sex” book appeared in 1992, wrapped in Mylar, like a condom, Ms. Goldberg had this to say:
“This must be the most gorgeously, even lavishly, produced piece of junk food since Midas tried to sneak a potato chip and found his touch had turned it to gold.”
She added, “Now for the contents: these pictures are billed as Madonna’s fantasies. They might not match yours. Mine, I confess, do not run to making out with two skinhead lesbians with tattoos, nipple rings and knives, but, hey, de gustibus non disputandum est.” She added, “I don’t much care what Madonna does so long as she does not do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
Reviewing a show about Weegee, the relentless crime photographer, in 1998, she wrote: “So cleverly did Weegee breach the fragile walls of privacy, already crumbling even then under the pressure of cameras and tabloids, that he showed the way to our own hungry times. I find it hard to like Weegee, but easy to admire his power. His influence was like a rock dropped in a pond: its ripples are still spreading.”
In 1997, she wrote about Irving Penn, the celebrated Vogue photographer.
“Penn has spent over half a century wielding a camera against the most implacable enemies: disorder, imperfection, the distracting natural world, mortality. He has not exactly come to terms with any of these but erected what barriers he could — a stringent sense of order to fend off chaos, a fierce devotion to a kind of photographic purity, a stripped-down sense of isolation to counter the world’s insistent clutter.”
Victoria Hesse Liebson was born on July 24, 1936, in St. Louis, to Alice (Schwarz) and Louis Liebson, a shoe company executive. She earned her B.A. at Wellesley College, graduating in 1958. A year earlier, she had married David Goldberg, a banker.
After the couple moved to New York City, Ms. Goldberg worked as a publishing assistant at Simon & Schuster and began pursuing a Ph.D. in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
She didn’t get around to defending her thesis, however; instead, she went to work as an editor for American Photographer magazine when it was launched in 1978.
In addition to her son Eric, Ms. Goldberg is survived by another son, Jeremy, and six grandchildren. She and Mr. Goldberg divorced in 1973. Another marriage, to Loring Eutemey, a graphic designer and illustrator, also ended in divorce. Her third husband, Laurence Young, a professor emeritus of astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died in 2021. She lived in Waterville Valley, N.H., before moving to the Manhattan assisted living facility.
Ms. Goldberg was a frequent lecturer on photography and the author or editor of a number of books, including “Photography in Print: Writing From 1816 to the Present” (1981), a collection of essays by photographers, like Alfred Stieglitz, and critics, like Baudelaire and Susan Sontag.
Another book by Ms. Goldberg, “The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives,” (1991), is a lively history of the medium and its cultural impact, from daguerreotype to X-rays, moon shots and Photoshop.
Even back in 1991, Ms. Goldberg cautioned readers about the tricky nature of photography, writing, “We could end up being more copiously supplied with news and less concerned, as well as less willing to believe the reports, than any society in history.”
“These photographs walked into our lives,” she added, “and in some way managed to change them. So it seems appropriate to ask the questions one would ask any intruder: How did you get in? And what are you doing here anyway?”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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