I review present experimental and theoretical status of electromagnetic decays of light mesons. Special attention is paid to single-photon decays of charged resonances, and to recent applications of the Primakoff technique to measure such processes. New data on radiative decays of pseudoscalar, vector, axial and tensor mesons are compared with several theoretical calculations involving quark models, unitary symmetry relations, and an effective Lagrangian approach. Vector Meson Dominance ideas, as applied to meson spectroscopy, are discussed in detail. Also, the electromagnetic properties of the A meson are examined in the context of resonance parameters observed in diffractive production and -lepton decays. Finally, I emphasize the importance of radiative processes in searching for glueball and hybrid states of matter.