The voice on the recordings is gentle, inquisitive, wise. “Soothing,” one person describes it.
It is the voice of photographer and writer Sheila Turner-Seed, interviewing some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century — Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Bruce Davidson, Cornell Capa, W. Eugene Smith, and Roman Vishniac. The conversations were recorded for the exhibition “Images of Man” that Turner-Seed created before her untimely death in 1979 at the age of 42.
There is another voice on those tapes, in the background – the sounds of a baby of only a year old or thereabouts, Turner-Seed’s daughter Rachel. Decades after her mother’s passing, Seed discovered those recordings and put them at the heart of a documentary, A Photographic Memory, a film that can also be described as gentle, inquisitive, and wise.
For the filmmaker, the recordings became an intimate way “to know that I did have a great bond with my mother,” she tells Deadline. “That it was lost not by anybody’s fault or not by her desire.”
Sheila Turner-Seed died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, leaving Rachel to be raised by a loving father, Brian Seed, also a noted photographer. Before finding the audio tapes, Rachel had little palpable evidence of the mother-daughter relationship, beyond a photograph of Sheila holding young Rachel in her arms.
“That picture is maybe the only picture that I had or remembered around the house,” she recalls, but she adds, “I couldn’t logically see myself as that baby… I don’t remember that moment. So I don’t quite relate to it. You kind of want to get back into the photograph, but you’ll never be able to. But I think it was that longing that I always felt.”
A Photographic Memory is playing this weekend at Laemmle Theatres throughout Los Angeles. From June 20-26 is plays at Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and on June 27 begins screening in New York, with a national roll out to follow throughout the summer. The film won the Film Independent Spirit Truer Than Fiction Award, as well as Best Film and the City and State Award at the Chicago International Film Festival and was nominated for awards at Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Poland, the Miami Film Festival, Cleveland International Film Festival, and the Spotlight Award at the Cinema Eye Honors.
The documentary unfolds as a journey of connection, or reconnection. In voiceover in the film, Rachel asks of her mother, “How could I know myself if I didn’t know you?”
“It’s about identity. It’s about this sort of nuance of who am I, who is my mother?” she explains. “Can I step in her shoes? Will that get me closer to her? I think that was part of the story.”
The film contains portions of Sheila Turner-Seed’s journals read in what sounds like her own voice – consistent with that heard on the audio recordings. And yet it is not Sheila but her daughter voicing the words.
“That was a decision I arrived at after a lot of thought,” Seed observes. “We were going to hire an actor at one point. At one point, before AI had really taken off, we were going to possibly use AI for her voice… We thought about all these different things.”
The viewer will have the impression of being present for the interview sessions between Turner-Seed, Henri-Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks and the other famed photographers heard on the recordings. That is achieved through recreation that feels remarkably authentic.
“My DP was a freaking genius,” the director enthuses. “He’s one of my closest friends, lives in England. I only used him for the recreation shoots, and he had never done that before; he’s a still photographer by trade. We shot all of them in one apartment in LA and he just was able to visualize those moments.”
Without it being stated explicitly, it becomes clear that Rachel is playing her mother in the recreations.
“It’s like I’m haunting her life,” Seed muses. “It’s kind of like I’m the ghost in the future going to the past.”
Seed says one documentary purist protested that she should have told the viewer – via text on screen? – that it was her in the role of her mother. The filmmaker concluded she wasn’t violating any unwritten rules of the nonfiction form.
“It’s about my inner world and my experience. So that’s subjective and it can really be anything,” she notes. “I think once I embraced that, I felt as long as it was authentic, it could be a documentary.”
Seed says her biggest challenge was not playing her mother, but another aspect of the filmmaking process.
“What was really hard for me was writing the narration and recording it. That was the hardest part for me emotionally,” she shares. “As a writer, it made me realize how out of touch I was with my own feelings. I had to get in touch with them in order to be able to finish the film. And I didn’t really want to; it felt like very hard work. It was like was forcing myself into this dungeon of feelings that I had to access. That was something that I didn’t anticipate when I started this.”
At one point in the film, Seed uses her mother’s interviews to create the feeling that mother and daughter are in dialogue with each other across the expanse of time.
“There was some alchemy that happened where it does sound, tone-wise, we’re actually talking with each other,” she affirms. “Part of me feels like I could have made a whole film just like that in a more experimental way, but I think I needed this film to be a little bit more grounded so people could follow the story.”
Seed continues, “I wasn’t a filmmaker when I started making it… I think what inspired me to make it a film was it felt like this three-dimensional time travel experience inspired by all these audio visuals and writing. Everything felt so visceral. And I want it to be as big and accessible as possible.”
The post Now Playing In Los Angeles: ‘A Photographic Memory,’ About A Daughter Discovering The Mother She Never Really Knew appeared first on Deadline.
