Thirty years after her mother’s death, photographer Rachel Elizabeth Seed discovers her mother’s work — more than 50 hours of interviews with the greatest photographers of the 20th century, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Cecil Beaton, William Albert Allard, Brian Lanker, Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson and Eliot Porter. When Rachel threads in the audio reels and presses play, she hears her mother’s voice for the first time since she was a baby. Sheila Turner-Seed, a daring, world-traveling journalist ahead of her time, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm when Rachel was just 18 months old. Moved to uncover more of what she left behind, Rachel sets out to revisit her mom’s subjects, family and friends, revisiting the photographers she interviewed decades before. As new truths emerge, Rachel builds an unlikely relationship with her mother through the audio recordings, photographs, and films her mother made during her brief life, crafting an imagined conversation through the cinematic medium. As she discovers the shocking secrets which may have led to her mother’s untimely death, Rachel’s ability to forge her own path hinges on how these revelations affect her own life. The film draws from footage of Rachel’s visits to the photographers her mother interviewed, Sheila’s award-winning audio-visual work, Super 8 family films, still photography, audio letters and journals, weaving together personal and photo-historical media to tell a universal story — about facing mortality and loss, the construction of memory and the restoration of a legacy. Along this path, Rachel explores the question of whether it is possible to get to know someone through the things they leave behind.
We are planning several special screenings with the A Photographic Memory filmmaker and its champions:
Ms. Seed wrote the following statement about her film:
“In my photography and creative work, I am driven by the desire for connection. Perhaps this is because my mother died when I was a baby; I’m always seeking to reconcile this loss in my life. It’s this drive that inspired me to make my debut feature documentary, A Photographic Memory.
“My work as an artist, photographer, photo editor, curator, writer, arts community founder, and cinematographer have greatly informed my knowledge and aesthetic sensibility in the media arts, paving the way for this film project and for my transition from photography to filmmaking. From 2004-2011 I created an audio-visual series about motherless women, interviewing and photographing 40 women and girls around the world, but it wasn’t until I turned the camera on my life in A Photographic Memory that I began to make sense of my loss. As I just turned the age my mother was when she died, it is also a personally timely project. I hope for the result to be cathartic for myself and for an audience who relates to losing someone close or being estranged from a parent. At the same time, I aim to memorialize my mother’s legacy as a woman ahead of her time who contributed to the canon of photography history. She died in her prime but left an undeniable mark through her work and great compassion for humanity. This legacy would be forgotten without this film.
“What excites me aesthetically about A Photographic Memory is the challenge of weaving the archival footage, photographs and audio along with contemporary footage together in a cohesive, artistic whole. Using my mother’s raw interviews with photographers as a thematic backbone, I draw from 100 years of our family’s Super 8 films, still photographs, contact sheets, letters, my mother’s journals, her journalistic tear sheets, and the footage I have shot of my own life and journey. My aim is for the disparate elements to transcend their individual meaning in order to tell the greater story of my search to know my mother, and through that, to make sense of life’s ephemerality. I have always been interested in the space where “real” elements are woven together to create a fabricated reality, which is both indisputable yet non-factual, representing my objective vision.
“The film plays on the tensions between remembering and forgetting, recovery and loss, and the probing of relationship and portraiture through lost archives, juxtaposition and cinematic form.”