Updated:2024-12-09 02:53 Views:179
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 Memoryjpwinner gaming,” 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.
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