Rachel Elizabeth Seed turns the camera on her mother and herself in A Photographic Memory (courtesy of Capariva Films and Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber)
A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (Rachel Elizabeth Seed, 2025)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Friday, June 27, through Sunday, June 29
newplazacinema.org
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, June 30, 7:00
www.ifccenter.com
“I have no memories of my mother. And when I set out to find her a few years back, she was basically a stranger to me,” Rachel Elizabeth Seed explains in her award-winning debut documentary, A Photographic Memory. “My dad never talked much about her except to tell me that she was an accomplished writer and photographer way ahead of her time. But it wasn’t until I became a photographer myself that I started to become curious about the work she created and whether in the pages of her transcripts and contact sheets, her journals and her audio tapes, I might also find her.”
Rachel’s mother, Sheila Turner Seed, was a pioneering photojournalist and filmmaker who died suddenly and unexpectedly in June 1979 at the age of forty-two, when Rachel was eighteen months old. While working on “The Motherless Project” (2004–11), in which she interviewed and photographed forty women who had grown up without a mother, Rachel found, in her father’s attic, a box of reels her mother had made, and decided to go on a journey to learn more about her by investigating her legacy while also dealing with her own sense of loss. “I thought that telling their stories would make me feel less alone. But what do you do when your greatest loss is something you can’t even remember?” she says.
A Photographic Memory is not about having total recall but is a moving and cathartic love letter constructed from family pictures and home movies, journals and letters, and personal remembrances centered around Sheila’s “Images of Man,” an audiovisual project for Scholastic in which she spoke with and photographed some of the most important and influential photographers in the world, compiling fifty hours of audio interviews with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Cecil Beaton, William Albert Allard, Brian Lanker, Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson, and Eliot Porter in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rachel also goes through Sheila’s phone book and calls up her old friends and contacts. “Your mother was a remarkable storyteller,” one instantly says.
Rachel visits with ICP founder Capa, Davidson, and Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, who remember Sheila well and talk about the interview sessions fondly. She meets with Scholastic president and CEO Dick Robinson, who was extremely close with Sheila; he happily recalls when Rachel worked there as an intern and how Sheila decided that she did not need a cameraman accompanying her on her Scholastic assignments. Among the others sharing memories are Sheila’s brother, Barry; Sheila’s ex-boyfriend Gabriel Edmont, who gets teary; her father, Joe Turner, a successful photographer himself; and Sheila’s old friend, author Lael Morgan, who refers to her and Sheila as “lifeaholics . . . Sheila had to see the world.”
Sheila’s relatives, including her father and grandfather, had experienced severe oppression in their native Russia and did not want to leave America once they arrived. “Many members of my family will not travel outside of US borders. It is only there that they feel safe. Maybe that’s one reason why I have an insatiable desire to travel everywhere and to see everything,” Rachel reads from her mother’s autobiography. Rachel also re-creates scenes from the interviews, bathed in mysterious black-and-white and filled with memorable quotes.
“I’m tired of being lonely,” Allard tells Sheila in Virginia in 1972. “Photography, it’s what I do, but it is not totally me.”
In his Paris living room in 1971, Cartier-Bresson offers, “Life is very fluid. Sometimes the pictures disappear and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, ‘Oh, please smile again. Do that gesture again.’ There’s no repetition. Life is once forever.”
“You have a lot of your mother in you,” Davidson says in the same New York City apartment where he spoke with Sheila in 1971. He also advises, “I think probably one of the most dangerous things that one can do is to look at themselves.”
Rachel admits, “Revealing myself scares me. What am I hiding?” But she is soon turning the lens on herself, not only discussing her relationship with her boyfriend, Joseph Michael Lopez, and whether she wants to have children but also observing herself in the archival footage she finds. Watching home movies, she says as if addressing her mother, “I saw you moving for the first time, family footage of your childhood, and then of your wedding. And then, at the end, I saw the two of us together. I only remember not having a mother, but here is a little girl who has a mother. And in this perfect arc of time, we’re together.”
It’s an intimate moment that gets to the heart of the film, which Rachel directed, wrote, and produced; it was edited and cowritten by Christopher Stoudt, shot by Rachel, Lopez, and Drew Gardner, and scored with a tender gentleness by Mary Lattimore and Troy Herion. A Photographic Memory is a vivid and poignant celebration of craft, of family lost and found, of film and photography and mothers and daughters. It will have you searching through your own albums, slides, and reels, finding long-forgotten gems. It is sad that, with the advent of the internet, smartphones, and social media, future generations will not have these opportunities to establish and reestablish personal connections with the past, as everyone is now a photographer and a filmmaker, posting away online, each picture fading away as soon as the next one is uploaded.
Rachel says, “The camera was always present,” which was a rare thing back then, when each click had to be made carefully, with limited availability on every roll. With A Photographic Memory, Rachel has given us a special treasure grounded in the art forms used by her mother, her father, and her with such joy.
A Photographic Memory is screening June 27–29 at New Plaza Cinema and June 30 at IFC Center; each show will be followed by a Q&A with Rachel Elizabeth Seed, along with Danielle Varga on June 27, Stoudt and Judith Helfand on June 28, Dami Akinnusi, Jill Campbell, and Liz Nord on June 29, and executive producer Kirsten Johnson on June 30 in a special encore from DOC NYC 2024.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]