The latest issue of Chicago-based art n’ culture magazine Proximity is making the rounds. Their fifth installment is their “Photography Issue“, and features plenty of excellent intellectual tug-of-war regarding the still image.

Conscientious has a nice dissection of Bert Stabler’s essay “I Don’t Like Photography“. It’s a good article addressing some basic “problems” of photography; a must-read for advanced students or anyone who likes thinking hard about this so-called “art photography”. But I agree with Joerg Colberg: the wheels come off towards the end when Stabler trots out “the usual suspects (Lacan, Foucault, Adorno)”.

I was particularly drawn to the interview with Rod Slemmons, Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography. He weighs in on a whole host of topics, but I found his insight about teaching photography very useful, worthy of goal status for aspiring educators:

I always gauge good instructors based on how dissimilar their work looks to their students’. Over the years, I have observed photographers that have had their students make contact sheets (or the digital equivalent), then put check marks by the ones that look like their work and say, “Print these.” But that’s kind of an old school thing. There’s a bump and when you get over that and understand what the student is up to in their own terms and encourage them to do their own thing—that strikes me as being a really good teacher.

Both of these articles are available in-full on the Proximity website, but get yourself a copy of this beautifully designed mag if you can. (A list of “places to buy” is here; scroll down to “Stockists”.)