Ernest Withers circa 1940s (Withers Family Trust)

Prolific Black photographer Ernest Withers captured Memphis’s bustling Beale Street district in its 1950s–’60s heyday. This included candid shots of great musicians when they were young: Elvis Presley, Ike and Tina Turner, B.B. King, and many more. Withers had a knack for being around famous people before they were too well known to appear in regular places like everyone else, photographing them in casual, unguarded moments.

He also chronicled the civil rights movement, and especially Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., snapping him in candid moments that aren’t usually associated with such an icon (like waiting in line at a Kentucky Fried Chicken). Director Phil Bertelsen’s documentary is filled with Withers’s photographs, and lots of good music, but there is a dark side to all of this: Withers was a longtime paid informant for the FBI. This engrossing film is an attempt by his admirers and relatives to face this head-on, and to suggest that it should not overshadow his work as a photographer. In this, it mostly succeeds.

The man himself largely remains a mystery throughout. There are some brief clips of Withers from 2002 (he died in 2007) and some interviews with family members and associates, who say positive things about him, yet it seems like nobody really knew him all that well. He truly lived to work—he had photography jobs from morning to night, every day, all over Memphis.

The documentary suggests that Withers only worked as an FBI informant for the money—that he thought he was sticking it to the man by taking money from the feds. He didn’t have any ideological alignment with the government, he just thought their money was as green as anyone else’s, so why not take it? After World War II, he worked as a vice cop in Memphis, but was kicked off the force. He felt he was framed and targeted because he was one of the few Black cops in the city. Taking money from the FBI was a chance at getting the financial stability he lost when his police career ended. It was also a way to use his photography skills to make more money than he otherwise would have.

Withers certainly wasn’t the only informant working with the FBI who was close to Black civil rights leaders, and it’s not clear if his information meaningfully impacted the movement in a negative way—although if the FBI kept paying him $20,000 a year (at least $170,000 in today’s money), he must’ve been giving them something useful. It’s likely that his pictures were what the feds prized—without that, they would just have names and other bare bones information. Withers’s photos brought the movement, and its people, to the feds’ attention, so they could see whom they were dealing with. Perhaps the most important skill for a photographer to have is the perception of trustworthiness, to put people at ease, and he had that. This is ironic, since he was working with the people who were actively trying to oppose the goals his friends were fighting for.

Should this totally overshadow his great work as a photographer? He produced a one-man archive of historical data that is perhaps singular in American history. He took literally millions of photographs (between one and two million) that bring the Memphis of the 1950s and ’60s alive in a way that no one else did. That’s what’s ultimately important about this man—just look at the pictures.