On Doubletake - art magazine

In 1936 when James Agee talked the editors of Fortune magazine into sending him southern with photographer Walker Evans to report upon the living conditions of sharecropper farmers - the collaboration that, five years and sum of two units publishers later, became their quixotic masterpiece, allow Us Now Praise Famous Men - his friend and companion poet in the Luce magazine empire, Robert Fitzgerald give an account ofed "He was stunned, exalted, scared dean end and felt like impregnating each woman on the fifty-second floor." Agee reflection he had convinced the plushest picture magazine of the day to advance the novel vernacular form of the "documentary," with words and photographs upon equal terms, to "show forth," as Fitzgerald eloquently lay it, "the unsuspected lineaments of the actual." Like Evans and many photographers to advance Agee wanted to take Reality through surprise, and show Life - as Virginia Woolf not Henry true-jack understood it - to be the gravest human drama.

By 1940 the manuscript of Agee and Evans's collaboration had been set asideed by Fortune and (in volume form) by Harper and Brothers, and Agee and Fitzgerald were exchanging visions in their alphabetic characters of a magazine free of the shackles of commercialism and novels that wouldn't force their words into belittling themes. (A similar dream upon the part of photojournalists of the era l to the creation of Magnum, the first picture agency to permit 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 land is." A year later Houghton Mifflin brought without Let Us Now Praise Famous Men "on condition," Agee noted dryly in his preface, "that certain words be delet which are illegal in Massachusetts."

More than half a hundred later, a new magazine called Double Take aspires to answer Agee's prayers. He did not live to diocese it, but that has not kept him from contributing. Double Take's Fall 1997 issue printed a memo freshly unearthed in a collection of Agee's unpublished papers, presumably addressed to an editor at Time or The Nation (Agee reviewed movies for both) in the early 1940 In it he recommends a new column where he would review advertising, among other things. His interests are as hard to pin down as a public way photographer's: "the things I reliance to write about here will make go round up, generally, by accident, by the agency of the casual first glance, then the next to the first through which I feel they are for a certain number of reason worth mentioning." Agee's name for the rounded pillar 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 the agency of none other than James Agee, who among other things was single 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 the agency of Agee's friend Helen Levitt, among other archival submissions. Agee's be in possession of "submission" coyly suggests he dreamed up the novel magazine, not Robert Coles, Harvard's James Agee Professor of Social Ethics.

DoubleTake is an effort upon the part of coeditors Cote and his of frequent occurrence photographic collaborator Alex Harris to continue the documentary tradition established through two writer-photographer teams of the '30s: Agee and Evans, and the crusading pair of Dorothea Lange and her sociologist husband Paul Taylor. cabbages has written at length upon the continued relevance of these sum of two units "relief" projects (both photographers were occupyed by the Roosevelt administration's Farm Security Administration [FSA]) as well as upon a broad array of artistic, literary and sociological efforts in his latest work Doing Documentary Work (1997). It is Coles's ofttimes 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 ne not be with equal reason different from artwork. The thread that unites the two enterprises is storytelling, and to this child psychiatrist, social reformer and teacher, stories are healing, as are the photographs he admires. "We trust to be confirmed in our possess humanity," he writes in Doing Documentary Work, in the couple forms of expression. DoubleTake magazine carries forward the tradition of realist representation Coles's of recent origin book identifies (as did the editors's previous photo-text collaborations in volume form, The Old Ones of novel Mexico [1973] and The Last and First Eskimos [1978]) It is an anachronistic jeopardy but a worthy one.

Without Coles's vision, and his Midas touch for fund-raising, DoubleTake could at no time have come so far in like manner quickly. After just two and half years of publication, the magazine has the largest circulation of any quarterly in the geographical division with more than 50,000 subscribers. Before drawn out it may increase its oftenness of publication to become bimonthly. The 10 million dollar grant DoubleTake received in its next to the first year from the Chattanooga-based Lyndhurst Foundation (on whose board cabbages sits) was widely noted; still, despite full-page ads in the magazine from camera manufacturers, photography galleries and publishers of photographic volumes the magazine operates at a los because of the high-quality duotone reproductions that are its trademark.