The documentary, by the director of “Who Killed Malcolm X?,” is a compelling biography of Ernest Withers, whose photographs helped chronicle Black history.
After the photojournalist Ernest Withers died in 2007, a bombshell investigation revealed that the respected Memphis photographer, known for taking over a million pictures of 20th-century Black life during his career, had also been a paid informant of the F.B.I.
The documentary “The Picture Taker,” directed by Phil Bertelsen (“Who Killed Malcolm X?”), uses this fact as an entry point into a compelling biography of Withers, whose photographs helped chronicle important events in the civil rights movement, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final days spent supporting the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis.
“The Picture Taker” presents several perspectives on Withers’s link to the F.B.I. and noticeably does not come down on a particular side — unlike “Judas and the Black Messiah,” a 2021 historical drama about the murder of the activist and Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, which took up similar subject matter.
But the reason to watch the documentary isn’t for the debate about Withers’s motives. It’s to see his impressive archive, which Bertelsen was smart to build the film around.
From his coverage of the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi to the weddings and first communions of everyday Black people in Memphis, Withers’s photographs give the documentary a visual language that coheres from start to finish.
“The Picture Taker” artfully plays with rendering the photographic image for the screen. It graphically alters Withers’s likeness, transforming pictures of him into telling animations and cutouts that pull him out of the background in which he so often dwelled and into the foreground.
Ultimately, the film immerses viewers in Withers’s considerable storytelling abilities as an image-maker at the same time that it examines his motives for taking those very pictures — that tension is what makes for an engrossing watch.
The Picture Taker
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
