DoubleTake's downfall

Afterimage, May-June, 2005 by Stephen Longmire

"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.