‘A Photographic Memory’ Review: A Filmmaker Looks Back at the Mother She Never Knew in a Poignant Documentary About Our Pictures of the Dead

Renowned journalist Sheila Turner Seed died of a brain hemorrhage when her daughter Rachel was a toddler. Almost 50 years later, Rachel tries to reframe her understanding of who Sheila was.

Filmmaker and photographer Rachel Elizabeth Seed doesn’t have any memories of her mother, the renowned journalist Sheila Turner Seed, who died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 42 when Rachel was only 18 months old. What she does have — in tantalizing yet torturous amounts — is hard evidence of the woman her mother was. The array of archival materials that Sheila left behind might pale in comparison to the thoughtless gigabytes of pictures and videos that today’s parents will bequeath to their kids, but her ghost is all the more haunting for how warmly elusive it feels. 

Sheila’s voice survives in the scripted audio programs she recorded for Scholastic, and in the candid diaries she kept throughout her adult life. Her visage endures in the black-and-white panel shows on which she appeared to discuss her work. Most of all, her vision can still be seen — clear as day — in the endless array of snapshots that she took, and in the groundbreaking audiovisual series she produced in 1972, for which she interviewed the most famous photographers on Earth about their artistic philosophies. 

“She was basically a stranger to me,” Rachel Seed laments at the start of the achingly personal documentary she’s made about the struggle to know her mother in absentia (though “lament” is too strong a word for the disaffected flatness of Seed’s voiceover, so de rigueur in non-fiction these days), but the filmmaker seems convinced that Sheila’s “Images of Man” project holds the undying secret to understanding the mom she never got to keep.

In fact, Rachel’s “A Photographic Memory” is entirely premised upon fulfilling that hope. And while the movie she’s extrapolated from it doubles as the biodoc that Sheila deserves (the story of a forward-thinking woman who never got proper credit for her contribution to the arts), this diaristic self-examination transparently exists so that Rachel can create a new picture of her mother — a pointillistic composite in which she might be able to see herself. 

Obsessively cobbled together during a years-long span that outlasted her first marriage and prevented her from pursuing other expressions of her artistic energy, Rachel Seed’s “A Photographic Memory” feels like an invitation to eavesdrop on a séance between a woman and her shadow. The peace that making this film allowed Seed to manifest for herself appears necessary to her survival, and the process of making this appears necessary to achieving that peace. Of course, a film so explicit about its purpose can only end in a way that serves that purpose, as Seed wouldn’t have felt that her work was done until she convinced herself that she was able to create the image of her mother that had always been missing from her mind. We have no choice but to hope and trust that the image Seed ultimately comes up with, most literally crystallized in this movie’s affecting final shot, is as meaningful to her as she needs it to be. 

Pre-ordained as Seed’s conclusion might feel, it’s plenty affecting to watch her get there. “A Photographic Memory” is guided by a probing specificity, and the deeper it pushes into the weeds of Sheila’s past — and the harder it listens for how they might reverberate through Rachel’s present — the easier it gets for viewers to hear echoes from their own lives in the stuff of the filmmaker’s search. Nakedly insular as “A Photographic Memory” can be for a commercial documentary (such as it is), Seed only needs a few minutes to move us past the most difficult question — “why am I watching this?” — that her premise might seem to invite.  

The answer, of course, lies in Sheila Reed’s “Images of Man” series, which offers Rachel the language and perspective she needs to understand the meaning of the pictures that her mother left behind. Sheila’s interviews with luminaries such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, and Lisette Model frame the filmmaker’s spirit quest in the most splendidly helpful of terms. 

“Life is once, forever,” Cartier-Bresson tells her mom, “and photography is a fight with time.” It’s a fight that has kept Seed in a permanent stalemate for as long as she can remember, as the immortality of her mother’s image — unaging in the various materials that Rachel inherited like a birthright — is forever offset by the cruel obviousness of her death. If Seed became a photographer in order to commune with her mother, was she motivated by the illusion of immortality that photography allows, or the live-in-the-moment urgency that taking great pictures demands? Seed doesn’t necessarily know how to answer that question, but there’s an intimacy in knowing that her mom once asked herself the same thing. “We photograph what we know — and also what we don’t know,” Model suggests.

Seed’s father, a garrulous and engaging Brit, may not be as famous for his semiotic theories, but his words do as much as anyone’s to fuel the filmmaker’s curiosity. “Is a photograph really a record of something,” he asks in some of the casual interview footage that Seed recorded of him at home, “or is it meaningless without our interpretation?” Later he adds: “A photographer’s work can easily disappear if no one’s looking after it.” 

That sentiment rings true for Seed on a number of different levels. For one thing, the “Images of Man” tapes fell into obscurity after her death, which means that the opening portions of this documentary function like a treasure hunt as Rachel cold calls Sheila’s old contacts at the International Center of Photography in pursuit of lost time. For another thing, it allows this film to feel like a poignant act of love from a child to her parent — a parent who the child was old enough to need while they were both alive, but never old enough to cherish. 

“A Photographic Memory” is a process of finding meaning through interpretation, but it’s also a work of archival preservation, one that makes Sheila Turner more present simply by exposing a wider audience to who she was and what she did. Like Rachel herself, we members of that audience can only hope to know so much about that. 

On their own, the details are interesting but unremarkable. Seed elicits a wide range of factoids through interviews with her mother’s brother, her boss, her autobiography, and even the still childless ex-boyfriend who broke up with Sheila after she chose to get an abortion prior to Rachel’s birth, and Seed does what she can to overlay those clues over the choices she’s made in her own life. We can sort of see how they line up, and how they don’t, but there’s a growing frustration in how Seed denies us the chance to draw more of our own conclusions.

It’s only through implication that we can guess at how preoccupied Seed became with the perceived similarities and differences between herself and her mother, as she almost exclusively reflects upon her own hopes and anxieties through the lens of how Sheila experienced some version of the same. The dead are less knowable than the living, perhaps, but easier to pin down. There are passages throughout the film in which Rachel and Sheila seem to be in conversation with each other, but it’s only at the very end that Seed explicitly formalizes that dynamic, and those final scenes are evocative enough to suggest that a consistently playful approach may have allowed this film to ask the same questions in a more open-ended way. 

Then again, “A Photographic Memory” — in order to offer Seed the lasting solace that she was determined to get from it — had to end with the director creating her own image of her mother. One that would last and let her move forward. The film couldn’t afford to create different, potentially conflicting images throughout its running time. And while that might not be the most satisfying outcome for us, Seed’s documentary is so vital because we believe that it’s a satisfying outcome for her. “I no longer feel like I have to look back,” Seed resolves, but that’s only because she was finally able to stop fighting with time, and — through the wisdom of the pictures her mother left behind — come to accept the ways in which she had already won. 

Grade: B+

“A Photographic Memory” will open at Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film in New York City on Friday, November 22.

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