Over the past several decades Vicki Goldberg has earned a reputation as one of America’s best writers on photography. Her criticism in the New York Times, American Photo, Vanity Fair, and other publications provides insight into changing developments in photography, and her books make available the wider context of the medium’s history. “Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present,” which she edited in 1988, brought together essays by such authors as William Henry Fox Talbot, Lewis Carroll, Charles Baudelaire, George Bernard Shaw, and Harry Callahan. It included “White Women,” her own wonderful piece about the career of fashion photographer Helmut Newton: She thinks his work is misogynist and pornographic, not the party line. Her writing is distinguished by her broad knowledge, her critical insight, her playful wit, and, when necessary, her courage.

The preface of Ms. Goldberg’s “Light Matters: Writings on Photography” (Aperture, 248 pages, $29.95) glosses the last quarter-century of photography, and its chapters include 18 essays on photographers and nine on broader themes. If it weren’t for an editor who expects me to file my own words, I might review “Light Matters” simply by reprinting long extracts of Ms. Goldberg’s writing, but a sampling of her first sentences must suffice. “Martin Parr is the emperor of bad taste.” “The first assignment Richard Avedon ever had was to photograph a dead man.” On Herb Ritts: “Celebrity is the crown jewel in the tin crown of pop culture.” On Weegee: “He went into the night, stalking disaster, and he found it.” “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.”

The point is, Vicki Goldberg can write. But it is not mere cleverness that sets her apart. Take her essay on the underappreciated Czech photographer Josef Koudelka:

Styles are not entirely easy to come by, but a clever photographer can find one without twisting his soul for it. A vision is more difficult and more rare. Style depends largely on surface components such as composition and contrast, on aesthetics, on a consistent eye, sometimes on gimmicks. Vision probably draws as much from the life as from the eye, from the heart as well as the brain, from the complexities of personality more than from ingenuity or mastery of craft.

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.

Ms. Goldberg’s ability to navigate confidently the tricky shoals of controversy is illustrated in her chapter on Ansel Adams. Adams is one of American’s most admired and even beloved photographers, but his reputation has been under assault from environmentalists since he broke with the Sierra Club over its increasingly leftist politics, and from critics who feel that, unlike New Topographic photographers such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, his depiction of the West is falsely prettified and sentimental.

Ms. Goldberg locates Adams’s vision in the continuum of American cultural history by reference to the transcendental essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson that both Adams and his father knew well, and describes his style as a type of Modernism. “Adams frequently cropped out any baseline in the foreground, setting the mountains afloat; his long-focus lens then flattened and compressed even the deepest landscapes,” she writes. “He could play the graphic and rectilinear forms of summits and shadows against ruffled patches of fallen snow and tentative wisps of cloud in pictures that would have been entirely abstract had they not so clearly been photographs of actual places.” Her understanding of his accomplishment restores to Adams a proper regard.

Ms. Goldberg’s longer pieces from Vanity Fair describe in greater detail the lives of the photographers she admires. Her affection for many of them is made clear in the small, pointed anecdotes she includes. Describing Brassai’s poverty, she tells us “it was so cold in Brassai’s apartment during the war that his pet fish froze.” She is very good with out-of-the-ordinary personalities such as Diane Arbus and Jacques Henri Lartigue. And blessedly free of hobbyhorses and ideology: There are no listings for Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or Karl Marx in the index to “Light Matters.”

But although there is very little politics, what Ms. Goldberg has included is a generic left-of-center liberalism disappointing in its regularity. She cannot mention Ronald Reagan, the president who hastened the end of Soviet tyranny and inaugurated 25 years (so far) of domestic prosperity, without some small note of disdain. This most affects “Documenting Poverty,” the one chapter I found myself in disagreement with. Discussing the decline in photographic interest in poverty, she says, “spectators have compassion fatigue, conservatives have the votes.” The first may be regrettable, but because of the latter, Congress passed reform legislation that moved millions from the welfare rolls to self-sufficiency. In discussing the museum displays of works by documentarians like Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, and Sebastiao Salgado, she says, “The question is: if hearts have grown indifferent under a barrage of images, do photographs in fine surroundings salve the conscience by stirring up just enough sympathy to assure us we have paid our emotional dues?” But that is not the question: The question is, are these good pictures?

There are several chapters that deal with sex, and here her instincts are sure-footed. “Friedlander’s nudes add up to a kind of disorganized treatise on hair,” she writes. And later: “The real up-to-date obsession is not sex but consumption, the locus of lust having shifted from the bed to the shopping mall.”

It is too late to read “Light Matters” on the beach, but read it before the next time you go to ICP or the photo galleries in Chelsea. You will appreciate everything you see so much more.