Celebrated photographer or informant? Questions abound in ‘The Picture Taker’

MONTCLAIR, NJ — The movie “The Picture Taker” was screened Oct. 24 and 25 at the recently concluded Montclair Film Festival. Directed by Phil Bertelsen and produced by Lise Yasui, it is a film about Ernest C. Withers (1922-2007), a photographer whose estimated 2 million images, taken beginning from the 1950s, right through the 1960s civil rights movement and beyond, represent the activity of seemingly every person and event in turbulent Memphis, Tenn. 

Withers and his camera were everywhere in Memphis, capturing dance halls, murder trials, protests, funerals, Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King Jr. and personages of the American civil rights movement. This movie contains many of his still, black and white images, along with recent interviews of relatives and people who knew him when he was the ubiquitous cameraman-about-town. The portions of the movie that contain the still pictures of life and death among Memphis men and women, are extraordinary. But after all, Withers did shoot 2 million photographs — some had to be good. This is not a criticism. The ones that are good are peerless. Withers was an intelligent cameraman who knew the exact moment to capture his subject, and perhaps the world is a better place because of that. 

Nonetheless, the movie portions, which rely not on Withers’ photographic artistry but on the recorded recollections of family and friends, are deeply troubling. Withers, it was learned after his death, was an FBI informant, taking pictures during the civil rights movement and listening in on conversations to provide reports to his handlers. Withers had been told by his handlers that the civil rights movement had been infiltrated by Communists and that he was needed to identify them. Whether he believed this or not, he was paid and, together with his own photography business, was making more than $100,000 annually by today’s standards.

It is difficult to know how to react to this. The people interviewed, considerably older than when he photographed them, forgave Withers, because, they say: Look how much of Memphis life he captured! That is all fair and good. But how to bring a reconsideration of Withers into the present? The film does not show a path. All the people interviewed in “The Picture Taker” knew Withers. Their reactions are emotional. There are no responses from younger people or historians that might answer the question for today as to whether Ernest Withers was a Michelangelo or a Benedict Arnold.

  FEATURED, Montclair Film Festival