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Chicago Tribune
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘A Photographic Memory' review: A beautiful search for a long-lost parent, in words and pictures
Unusual in the pre-digital age, before rampant cellphone camera chronicles of everyone's lives changed our visual landscape forever. This is what photographer and filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed remembers of her childhood in 'A Photographic Memory,' a supple nonfiction triumph with a weeklong run at the Siskel Film Center. Seed's film pieces together an idea of a vanished loved one, from inchoate fragments of loss unique to those who never really knew a parent. The filmmaker's mother, Sheila Turner Seed, was a remarkable, adventurous spirit and an accomplished global photographer, writer, interviewer and Albany Park native. She died suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage, in 1979. She was 42. Daughter Rachel was 18 months old. There were photographs, of course, many taken by Seed's father, British photographer Brian Seed, who sold stock images featuring young Rachel as a frequent camera subject. She was just an everygirl in those photos, at a birthday party, or playing with friends on the sidewalk, or twirling around the house. It was, as director, co-writer and co-editor Seed says in 'A Photographic Memory,' a false front of normalcy. In 2008, well into adulthood, Seed discovered a stash of reel-to-reel audiotapes — hours and hours of interviews her mother conducted in the early 1970s with 10 celebrated photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson. This was a complicated emotional lifeline: the sound of her mother's voice, at long last. Seed, who followed her parents' career paths as a photographer, also discovered a trove of her mother's own photographs, revealing a distinctive, clear-eyed aesthetic and a nomadic itch. Turner Seed, as one of her friends and colleagues interviewed for 'A Photographic Memory' phrases it, wasn't a workaholic, exactly. She was a 'lifeaholic,' living, traveling, striving for the fullest possible existence. Her recorded conversations with Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks and others, and daughter Seed's own interviews decades later with many of the same people, become a beguiling whole in 'A Photographic Memory.' Turner Seed's interviews served as the basis for the popular eight-part audiovisual educational project 'Images of Man.' From this wellspring, Seed's documentary took shape, though it took a full 16 years to come to fruition. The delicately woven final version, made with co-writer and lead editor Christopher Stoudt, devotes precisely the right amount of screen time to Seed's own perspective and life circumstances. It's a movie about how we remember, and how photographs and audio recordings can answer questions, though never fully, and always open to interpretation. There are, however, remnants of Turner Seed's life that her daughter shares with us in this film that are wonderfully direct. Some are ordinary journal entries that turn out to be succinctly extraordinary in their brevity. At one point, teenage Turner Seed wrote in her journal: 'Mom told me I should marry him. How can she play with my life that way?' Without playing with anyone's life, 'A Photographic Memory' makes beautiful sense of the connections between mother and daughter, work and love and other mysteries. No MPA rating (brief partial nudity) Running time: 1:25 How to watch: June 20-26, Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed will introduce and discuss 'A Photographic Memory' at several screenings, details at
Los Angeles Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘A Photographic Memory' charts a daughter's dive into the legacy of a mother she never knew
The accomplished mother that photographer-writer Rachel Elizabeth Seed never knew is the star of her deeply affecting 'A Photographic Memory,' one of last year's best documentaries, finally making its way to Los Angeles theaters. This poetic gem is a journey from the weight of absence to the serenity of presence, thanks in no small part to the inquisitive, gifted woman pulled from obscurity: Sheila Turner-Seed, whose life was short but full and worth revitalizing. Turner-Seed, a journalist, was 42 when she died in 1979, leaving behind an 18-month-old daughter, a bereft photographer husband (Brian Seed) and a legacy of wide-ranging, globe-trotting reportage that culminated in a renowned oral and visual history called 'Images of Man.' The project was anchored by Turner-Seed's groundbreaking interviews with the world's best living photographers at the time, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cecil Beaton, Lisette Model and Gordon Parks. And though she only ever referred to herself as an amateur with a camera, Turner-Seed once saw a photo of hers land on the cover of the New York Times. That her daughter also pursued photography and nonfiction storytelling could be viewed as the manifestation of a deeply felt connection. Was following her mother's passion the most readily available way to process a personal loss the director essentially had no memory of? Seed only began exploring the true breadth and emotion of her mother's legacy when she herself reached the age that her mom died, a milestone fraught for many grown, parentless children. What the younger Seed found, accompanied by memories from her mother's colleagues, was a rich archive of adventurous work and personal expression: photos, journals, contact sheets, Super8 film, audio pieces and a trove of interviews. These discussions reveal a soulful, probing mind that not only kept her subjects on their toes, but warmly elicited thoughtful answers about the nature of their moment-in-time art. Turner-Seed's own writing lays bare a struggle for self-fulfillment, to reconcile the traditional values pushed by her Jewish immigrant parents with a restless need to discover and make her own way. In an especially revealing journal entry from 1972, she wonders if she'll grow in her chosen fields if she marries and has a child — but also, will she want to? A lanky, warm presence with a sociable smile, Turner-Seed is never far from a keenly observed thought or ambivalent feeling. Why 'A Photographic Memory' stands out, however, is her daughter's handling of this precious life. It's a heartbreakingly imaginative conjuring of the parent-child connection that never came to be, but which Seed and her editors (including documentary cutting legend Maya Daisy Hawke) finesse to life. With melancholy and playfulness both, Seed threads in her own introspective voice-over and contemporary footage (poring over material, visiting her dad, sparring with a boyfriend). She also adds grainy period re-creations of her mom's interviews, Seed playing her own parent in these 8mm snippets. Eventually, technology allows these distant intimates to share a frame. Biographical and essayistic, 'A Photographic Memory' suggests both a woman interested in locating her remarkable mother, gone too soon, and an artist exploring her own place. Of the impulse to take a photo, to grab the moment, we hear Cartier-Bresson excitedly tell Turner-Seed, 'Life is once, forever.' Her future daughter's marvelous movie embodies that idea beautifully.
