On Doubletake.

In 1936, when James Agee talked the editors of Fortune magazine into sending him south with photographer Walker Evans to report on the living conditions of sharecropper farmers - the collaboration that, five years and two publishers later, became their quixotic masterpiece, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - his friend and fellow poet in the Luce magazine empire, Robert Fitzgerald recounted, "He was stunned, exalted, scared dean through, and felt like impregnating every woman on the fifty-second floor." Agee thought he had convinced the plushest picture magazine of the day to advance the new vernacular form of the "documentary," with words and photographs on equal terms, to "show forth," as Fitzgerald eloquently put it, "the unsuspected lineaments of the actual." Like Evans and many photographers to come, Agee wanted to take Reality by surprise, and show Life - as Virginia Woolf, not Henry Luce, understood it - to be the gravest human drama.

By 1940 the manuscript of Agee and Evans's collaboration had been rejected by Fortune and (in book form) by Harper and Brothers, and Agee and Fitzgerald were exchanging visions in their letters of a magazine free of the shackles of commercialism and news that wouldn't force their words into belittling themes. (A similar dream on the part of photojournalists of the era led to the creation of Magnum, the first picture agency to let photographers do their own editing.) Despairing of the publishing world, Agee wrote his friend that the absence in America of the magazines they envisioned "makes me know what a fat-assed, frumpish hell-on-earth this country is." A year later Houghton Mifflin brought out Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, "on condition," Agee noted dryly in his preface, "that certain words be deleted which are illegal in Massachusetts."

More than half a century later, a new magazine called Double Take aspires to answer Agee's prayers. He did not live to see it, but that has not kept him from contributing. Double Take's Fall 1997 issue printed a memo recently unearthed in a collection of Agee's unpublished papers, presumably addressed to an editor at Time or The Nation (Agee reviewed movies for both) in the early 1940s. In it he proposes a new column where he would review advertising, among other things. His interests are as hard to pin down as a street photographer's: "the things I hope to write about here will turn up, generally, by accident, by the casual first glance, then the second through which I feel they are for some reason worth mentioning." Agee's name for the column, which never materialized, was "Double Take."

"Little did we know, when we launched this magazine in 1995," write the editors of today's magazine of that title, "that the name 'DoubleTake' had been bandied about more than fifty years earlier by none other than James Agee, who among other things was one of documentary literature's leading lights." DoubleTake regularly prints snippets from mid-century photographers and writers its editors admire, backward glances to acknowledge the antecedents of the contemporary documentary work they feature. The same issue ran photographs by Agee's friend Helen Levitt, among other archival submissions. Agee's own "submission" coyly suggests he dreamed up the new magazine, not Robert Coles, Harvard's James Agee Professor of Social Ethics.

DoubleTake is an effort on the part of coeditors Cotes and his frequent photographic collaborator Alex Harris to continue the documentary tradition established by two writer-photographer teams of the '30s: Agee and Evans, and the crusading pair of Dorothea Lange and her sociologist husband Paul Taylor. Coles has written at length on the continued relevance of these two "relief" projects (both photographers were employed by the Roosevelt administration's Farm Security Administration [FSA]) as well as on a broad array of artistic, literary and sociological efforts in his latest book, Doing Documentary Work (1997). It is Coles's often expressed belief that photographers and writers, as witnesses to "life as it is being lived," are social scientists of a sort, and that social science need not be so different from artwork. The thread that unites both enterprises is storytelling, and to this child psychiatrist, social reformer and teacher, stories are healing, as are the photographs he admires. "We hope to be confirmed in our own humanity," he writes in Doing Documentary Work, in both forms of expression. DoubleTake magazine carries forward the tradition of realist representation Coles's new book identifies (as did the editors's previous photo-text collaborations in book form, The Old Ones of New Mexico [1973] and The Last and First Eskimos [1978]). It is an anachronistic venture, but a worthy one.

Without Coles's vision, and his Midas touch for fund-raising, DoubleTake could never have come so far so quickly. After just two and half years of publication, the magazine has the largest circulation of any quarterly in the country, with more than 50,000 subscribers. Before long it may increase its frequency of publication to become bimonthly. The 10 million dollar grant DoubleTake received in its second year from the Chattanooga-based Lyndhurst Foundation (on whose board Coles sits) was widely noted; still, despite full-page ads in the magazine from camera manufacturers, photography galleries and publishers of photographic books, the magazine operates at a loss because of the high-quality duotone reproductions that are its trademark.

Apart from Aperture, the bi-annual Blind Spot (founded in 1992) is probably the only other national magazine featuring such scrupulously reproduced photography, and it is a distinctly different venture from DoubleTake. Like Aperture, Blind Spot is firmly rooted in the photographic art community, though both magazines publish writing. DoubleTake, however, is as much a literary magazine as a photographic one, its editors both insist. They expect their readership to overlap with that of mainstream literary magazines like Atlantic, Harper's and The New Yorker. The central role DoubleTake has quickly come to occupy in the world of many exhibiting photographers may be almost accidental, a reflection of the dearth of other resources available to them. The magazine's goal - oddly like that of Life in the '30s and '40s - is to present human affairs with memorable photographs and prose. The difference between DoubleTake and Life is of course an historical one. As one of the first magazines to present the news in photographs, (it commenced publication in 1936, the year Agee and Evans set out for Hale County) Life relied on the profound surprise its vast audience felt on seeing newsworthy faces and places as if at firsthand. DoubleTake does not publish "news" as such, indeed its focus on what Coles calls "human actuality" should be taken as a critique of the mainstream media's understanding of newsworthiness. Like many documentary photographers, the magazine prefers to take the long view, studying social phenomena at their neglected peripheries, rather than honing in on today's sound bite. In a world saturated with photographs of human drama, DoubleTake publishes those its editors feel merit a second look as well as a first. Even the magazine's unhurried publication schedule can be seen as an effort to slow down the pace of contemporary life.

Although DoubleTake is addressed to a broad audience, Harris notes that "photographers have adopted the magazine as their own." But even as photographers are grateful for this new vehicle, many are bemused by it. "I don't understand the magazine," is a frequent refrain among photographers and general readers alike. Some photographers criticize its insistent liberal humanism, its elevation of the photography of the disadvantaged associated with the FSA. DoubleTake gets called too political, and not political enough. In other words its politics are not fashionable. Both the magazine's editors insist they do not want to sponsor any current issue or cause, yet their readers frequently come away feeling that the photographs have been yoked to the magazine's overarching cause, that of "the documentary." Perhaps this is a sign of how strongly many people feel that art only belongs on pristine gallery walls, as if these were not also a discursive context that implicates the work. Imagine the outcry Edward Steichen's 1955 "Family of Man" exhibition would elicit from photographers and critics if it were hung at the Museum of Modern Art today, and you have a reasonable analogy to the objections DoubleTake has inspired. Steichen's show perfected and rendered obsolete Life's style of photography, creating a layout in three dimensions. It was a style that tended to treat photographers instrumentally, yoking them to grand, often dilute, human themes. DoubleTake is far more successful in the effort Harris describes "to think about photographers as authors of their work." Still, the editor's concern with "the documentary" so permeates the magazine that each contributor must add to this growing idea.

Encouraging work in the spirit of Agee and Evans is a tricky business. Their defiant collaboration was utterly idiosyncratic and fundamentally unrepeatable. "Any great work begins or ends a genre," Walter Benjamin wrote of Marcel Proust. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men exploded the genre of photo-text documentary that was the currency of the Depression. Affronted by the picturesque representations of rural poverty, Agee offered up "lumps of excrement" - nuggets of Reality guaranteed to "epater les bourgeois real good," as Stephen Daedalus would say. A museum founded to commemorate a revolution must live in contradiction - and one of DoubleTake's missions is the commemoration of such revolutionary works. Surely the next collaboration in the spirit of Agee and Evans will look unrecognizably different; probably it will work in some other format than the once novel pairing of photographs and text. In Doing Documentary Work, Coles cites Evans's refusal late in life to be called a documentary photographer, averring that he was an artist capable of adopting a documentary style. This sounds like a rebuttal of Coles's most basic supposition, that the word "documentary" usefully describes photographers like Evans. It is far from the only such bombshell that Coles plants in his book. Like Agee, his prose is full of undermining self-criticism. Like Agee, who blames himself along with everyone else for taking advantage of his beloved sharecropper families, Coles poses a challenge to himself and lets it stand. Clearly he believes these are contradictions that continue to be played out.

Former Museum of Modern Art Curator of Photography John Szarkowski ends the brief essay he wrote to introduce a selection of nineteenth-century maritime photographs in DoubleTake's Fall 1997 issue with the hope that "photographers might stop dreaming of a universal audience, and try again to describe the life on their own street." He is singing Coles's song. Coles likes to quote his own mentor, doctor and poet William Carlos Williams, and has printed these lines as a sort of manifesto in the magazine: "outside/outside myself/there is a world to explore." Coles also regularly quotes Williams's dictum: "no ideas but in things." Together the two phrases explain his interest in photography, and provide as concise an account as any available of what is meant at DoubleTake by "documentary." It is an open-ended definition.

If what is meant by documentary at DoubleTake, in either words or pictures, is allowed to ossify, the magazine's contributors and potential contributors will be as much at fault as its editors. Taking them at their word, they are open to all sorts of expressions. Of course there are whole branches of contemporary photography, many of them digitally inspired, that have renounced photography's traditional mission to show the world outside the self for which the magazine will not be a venue. It will be interesting to see where the obviously invented worlds of the digital photographer and the supposedly real ones of the "documentarian" reconvene. DoubleTake's ability to hold the attention of the artistic community concerned with photography may hinge on the ways in which it addresses such developments. Ironically enough, DoubleTake's presentation of photography may be more available to those without an investment in the notion of photography as a self-conscious art - if they can find their way into the magazine's highly photographic world.

STEPHEN LONGMIRE, a photographer and writer, teaches in the photography department at Columbia College, Chicago.