Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s mother died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage when Rachel was 18 months old. Sheila Turner Seed was only 42. In “A Photographic Memory,” the daughter, now grown, searches for the mother. But her yearslong journey reaches far beyond personal narrative, blooming into a moving meditation on memory, interpretation and the nature of photography itself. For Rachel, it is both elegy and rebirth.
Photography is at the movie’s center because Sheila was a photographer, and a remarkable one. Her photos fill the film, mostly images from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the friends and colleagues whom Rachel tracks down for the film are effusive in their praise of Sheila’s talent and sensitivity. Sheila’s stories appeared in major publications (including The New York Times), and as an editor at Scholastic magazines, she began recording interviews with people in New York and editing them into short audio “documentary records” about topics like cops, drugs and gentrification. In 1972, she worked with the International Center of Photography founder Cornell Capa to produce and edit a groundbreaking exhibition titled “Images of Man,” which centered on work by eminent photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, W. Eugene Smith and many more, accompanied by a soundtrack of interviews conducted by Sheila herself. (Rachel dedicates her film to Capa.)
Rachel knows all of these things about her mother. But knowing about someone and knowing someone are miles apart, and Rachel wants to truly know her mother. Raised by her father, Brian Seed, who is also a photographer, Rachel was surrounded by a family of people who were, as she notes, always holding cameras, documenting life as they saw it. The shutterbug bit Rachel very early. And so it is to the copious archives she goes, hoping she might find her mother there.
Watching “A Photographic Memory” is like watching an image slowly come into view in a darkroom tub as the minutes tick by. In fact, much time passes — while making the film, Rachel meets a man, marries him, and then, after five years of marriage, separates from him, all while she grapples with questions about her own ambivalence toward motherhood and questions about balancing work and love.
But the director’s personal life is never the central focus of her film, much to her credit. It’s a personal journey, and Rachel clearly sees many ways in which her life and her mother’s life have rhymed. Yet she also knows that this is not a film about a solitary search, not really. Her exploration is into something much bigger: what an image can really reveal, and how memories shift and shape our sense of self. “Is a photograph actually a record of something, or is it meaningless without interpretation?” she asks, while we see images of her parents at their simple wedding.
Rachel delicately balances these questions against an inquiry into her mother’s life, which takes her down many roads. She calls people in her mother’s address book, travels in an attempt to see what her mother saw, speaks with old friends and boyfriends and talks to colleagues. She listens to her mother speak on tape and watches video footage, learning what her mother sounded like, how she moved, how she smiled, why people keep telling her she resembles her mother.
A rich array of techniques are employed in this film: atmospheric re-enactments of interviews that Sheila conducted, archival footage drawn from many sources, contemplative narration from Rachel and scenes of looking at negatives and other work that Sheila left behind. It’s all woven together seamlessly, and only gradually do we realize how much Rachel is not just looking at her mother’s world but trying to enter it. Sometimes we hear a line of audio from Sheila’s interviews, lifted out of context, and Rachel replies to it as if her mother is speaking to her. She is trying to draw closer to the mother she never knew. By the end, I think she has.
Rachel is only a few years older than me, and my father also died suddenly, when he was just a little older than Sheila. So while, unlike Rachel, I knew my father, I think that’s why “A Photographic Memory” struck me the way it did: It’s a film that captures the unsettling sensation of reaching middle age, knowing the length of the road ahead is uncertain but certainly shorter than it’s ever been, and not being able to see past the age your parent was upon death. I lately find myself thinking uneasily not about death but about the sped-up passage of time, in a way that mirrors Rachel: “Taking pictures quiets my anxiety about time passing, and gives us something to hold on to,” she says.
In audio from an interview with Sheila, Cartier-Bresson also tries to grapple with the anxious nature of a photograph. It’s a “fight with time,” he says. Once the moment is past, you can’t perfectly recreate it — “life is very fluid, and sometimes the picture has disappeared,” he tells her. “Life is once, forever.” In “A Photographic Memory,” Rachel implicitly answers that assertion. That’s true, of course. But imperfectly recreating the past is better than letting it slip away with the passage of time. Searching for Sheila gives Rachel a way to understand herself. Revisiting the record of time reminds us that we are all but a moment in a much grander narrative.
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