DoubleTake's downfall.

"I would tell the children I wasn't interested in finding out anything
in particular, merely knowing, to a degree, how they lived and what they
thought about--insofar as it was their inclination to tell me."--Robert
Coles, Children of Crisis, Volume 4

In November 2004, after several years of fundraising but only one issue in two years, Double Take, the magazine of documentary photography and writing founded by Robert Coles, its editor since 1995, closed its office in Somerville, Massachusetts, outside Boston. Its website posted a thank you to all who tried to save it. The last issue, Summer 2003, was financed by a series of benefit concerts by Bruce Springsteen, whom the magazine had featured as a contemporary documentarian some years before. Now even the website is gone. So is an effort, reported in the January 2005 issue of Print magazine, to bring out an anthology of the best of DoubleTake.

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"[The] magazine was dying for a couple of years," Coles, a Harvard professor, child psychiatrist and author, said in a recent telephone interview from his Massachusetts home. "The 9/11 issue was really the last issue." It was "a lingering death, with all the psychiatric symptomatology," he continued. "Finally, I had to put a stop to it."

Talking with those who put out DoubleTake, or tried to, over the past 10 years reveals a pattern of high hopes and broken relationships, extravagant funding and financial mismanagement. Many attribute these mood swings to Coles, much as they revere him. The magazine struggled financially ever since it left its first home at Duke University in 1999. Given its dedication to impeccably reproduced photography and its aversion to standard news cycles, it seemed unlikely to break even. A sequence of senior staff members butted heads with the charismatic editor, but the magazine's intellectual identity was as recalcitrant as its finances. It was a polished vehicle for a vernacular art. It published the models of the past alongside the practitioners of the present, behaving more like a museum than a magazine.

"Magazines require a kind of philanthropy," Coles said, "which is what it got at the beginning with the Lyndhurst Foundation. That was the whole story of DoubleTake." The Tennessee-based foundation, on whose board Coles served at the time, gave the magazine two million dollars to begin publishing in 1995, followed by an endowment of another 10 million, plus interest, the following year. These much-publicized grants were made to the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, which Coles helped found in 1989. This remains a sore point for him, since the Center ejected the magazine and kept the last five million dollars of its evaporating endowment in 1998.

For its first 12 quarterly issues (a total of 30 were published) DoubleTake was coedited by Alex Harris, a photographer with whom Coles had collaborated on two documentary books and on founding both the Center and the magazine. Harris oversaw day-to-day affairs, while Coles came down from Boston every month or two.

"This was the organization through which and onto which we wanted to build a magazine," Harris said of the Center, where he still teaches. Although he remains "enormously grateful" to Coles "for the quality of the collaboration," which he maintains was "in the tradition of Agee and Evans," the pair's oft-cited heroes, Harris left DoubleTake in 1998. Looking back, he now wonders about the "paradox of wanting to build a community of loners," but he also feels it was "a squandered opportunity."

Soon after Harris left, the Center's leadership told Coles he could kill DoubleTake or take it elsewhere, along with the name and copyright to back issues, but not the remaining Lyndhurst funds. More than 10 million dollars had been spent in three years on printing costs, generous fees to contributors and contributing editors and staff salaries. That same year, 1998, the magazine won a National Magazine Award for general excellence.

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Jack Murrah, the Lyndhurst Foundation's President and a member of the Center's board at the time, said he felt obliged to remind his colleagues on the board, who were "deferential" to fellow board member Coles, that they were responsible for administering the magazine's grant. The Center could have let DoubleTake spend out its endowment, but Murrah told the board it could suspend the magazine's funding if the finances warranted. Murrah was not surprised the magazine lost money--he regarded it as "an exercise in responsible loss publishing"--but was alarmed by how quickly it was spent, and by the leadership crisis this was causing at the Center, which the Foundation had funded since its inception. DoubleTake was the Center's most public program, which gave Coles more power than his title and absentee position implied.

"It was never the intention of the Lyndhurst Foundation to allow Bob Coles to call all the shots at the Center," Murrah said, adding that he still regrets losing a friend over this misunderstanding. Tom Rankin was hired in 1998 to direct the Center and to dissolve its connection with DoubleTake.

"You have to spend money to make money," Coles said several New York publishers advised him at the time. He hoped DoubleTake's circulation would increase (subscriptions peaked at 85,000 in 1998) and advertising revenues would go up proportionally. Murrah hoped Lyndhurst's gift would attract other donors, but it did not.

"If it was going to be run in the commercial business world," Rankin said recently, "money was being spent as if it was somebody else's, not as if it was a backstop." Some at the Center were uncomfortable with the magazine's high profile, he recalls. Its budget seemed inconsistent with the Center's mission to encourage and disseminate social documentary work, with its historic emphasis on poverty. "There was a lot of rhetoric from Bob about how this was a grassroots journal when it was very beautiful and very elite and headed for the coffee table."

Since DoubleTake's departure, the Center has grown dramatically, offering 15 undergraduate courses annually where it offered only two when the magazine began. It has added a continuing education program, among several others. "The truth is the Foundation grant became an endowment for the Center for Documentary Studies," Coles reflects.

Toby Lester, now a deputy managing editor at The Atlantic Monthly, spent nearly a year getting DoubleTake back on its feet when it reached Somerville in 1999. When asked what he and fellow editor Alan Reeder inherited, Lester recalls, "a big one-room office with a lot of boxes. There was a box somewhere with all the articles for the next issue, but we couldn't find it for days!" Only two junior staffers made the trip north, he recalls.

The magazine became its own non-profit, the DoubleTake Community Service Corporation, so it could accept donations. Grants totaling two million dollars came from the Massachusetts-based Civil Society Institute and a congressional "coin bill," arranged by Coles' friend and Massachusetts Congressman Joseph Kennedy (Robert's son). But circulation plummeted in the Boston years, bottoming out at 25,000, with subscribers receiving fundraising pleas as often as renewal notices. DoubleTake would never again hire an exhibiting photographer for its editorial staff, nor would Coles hire another coeditor, preferring a string of deputy and managing editors with whom he engaged in a recurrent tug-of-war, delegating responsibility, but never authority. Harris believes Coles wanted to downplay the role of photography, a major source of the magazine's initial buzz, in his search for a broader readership. The two have not spoken since Harris left.

"You have to have a very strong and almost impossible person to make a good editor," Alice Rose George believes. George, a former photography editor at Granta who briefly headed Magnum's New York office, was a consultant to DoubleTake in its Durham days. "Alex balanced with Bob," she recalls, but adds that Coles often vetoed decisions on minor details. Despite the creative tension between its founding editors, she felt the magazine was in "danger of becoming too self-content" in its equation of documentary work with good works. She wished it had "pressed the boundaries of documentary more" and that it had a sense of humor and more tolerance for sex. "If you don't have laughter and sex ...," she warned.

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George was not the only one to criticize DoubleTake for not straying far from its models--the social documentarians of the Depression era. Ira Glass, National Public Radio's eclectic documentarian, told Coles in a public forum on documentary work the magazine hosted in 2001 that reading his magazine was "like eating fiber." But Coles and later staffers maintain they had plenty of ideas to keep the magazine current. R. Jay Magill, an editor for much of the magazine's time in Boston, said he was eager to plan issues around contemporary themes. He wanted to interview laid-off Enron employees. Coles said he wanted to do a story on the people who attend television talk shows like Oprah, Doctor Phil and Judge Judy--"the people who connect ordinary people to the television world." Magill insists, "The form did not run out of steam. What got dry was the repetition of content. We were trying to back it out of the parking lot."

Magill's last colleague on the editorial staff, Kirk Kicklighter, a former teaching assistant of Coles (his Harvard courses were a regular source of staff in later years), spent much of his final year at DoubleTake resolving a nightmarish tax situation. The magazine had not paid taxes in four years. Towards the end, Magill and Kicklighter hoped to launch a series of Granta-style quarterly books under the DoubleTake imprint, shifting production costs to an outside publisher. There was interest, they said, but not from Coles. He said he feared the publishers they considered only wanted free articles from him.

Elena Rue, an aspiring photographer who was an intern at DoubleTake in its last year, never got to put out an issue, but wrote this about her experience: "As you can imagine it was very frustrating to try to save a magazine that had so much potential, but I think the experience was well worth it. The problem now is the large hole in the media where DoubleTake once was." Rue summarizes, from her point of view, the magazine's achievement:

DoubleTake was a publication that celebrated the tradition of documentary work in a way that could reach the average person as well as the academic. It was a way for poets, journalists, writers, photographers and other artists to share their experiences and show the world through their own eyes. It took a grassroots concept and shared it with a broader audience. I would venture to guess that many of its readers still hold on to their past issues. It has a book-like quality that could be flipped through at home or used in a classroom. I don't know of any other publication that has the same inspiring and enlightening quality that DoubleTake had, but I hope another one comes along.

Coles has not given up on the magazine. "I'm not so sure this is over," he said. "Who knows, in another year or two...."

STEPHEN LONGMIRE is a photographer and writer living in Wisconsin. His essay on the birth of DoubleTake appeared in Afterimage Volume 25, no. 5 (March/April 1998).