18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Vicki Goldberg Dies at 88; Saw Photography Through a Literary Lens
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.
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