Rachel Elizabeth Seed was only 18 months old when she lost her mother, journalist Sheila Turner Seed. In her new documentary and feature directorial debut A Photographic Memory, Seed gets to know her mother for the first time through more than 50 hours of interviews she conducted in the 1970s with some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century.
Called Images of Man, Turner Seed compiled the interviews into an educational project that sought to document the creative intent behind photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, and Cornell Capa.
But as much as she was documenting these famous photographers, she was also documenting herself, creating a kind of road map for her daughter to get to know her decades after her death.
A Photographic Memory screened on Friday at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival in Middlebury, Vermont. The film won the festival’s Ralph Steiner Prize for Poetic Cinema.
In it, Seed not only meets her mother through her photographs, diary entries, and recordings, but through intimate stories told by her father, old friends, and past lovers that Seed tracks down.
Below, Seed — a former photo editor at New York Magazine and a Sundance Edit & Story Lab fellow — tells us about learning how to making a documentary for the first time with no experience, what inspired her to become a filmmaker, and giving her mom the recognition she deserves.
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Q&A With A Photographic Memory Director Rachel Elizabeth Seed
MovieMaker: What do you think your mom would think if she could see this movie?
Rachel Elizabeth Seed: That’s a good question. I think, as you might have gathered in the in the film, she always had this sort of conflict within herself of knowing that she could achieve greatness and holding herself to this very high standard — but then having this internal pressure from her parents and from society just to be like a good housewife, or whatever women were expected at that time.
So to me, this is putting her work and her spirit on a bigger stage that I feel like she always wanted for herself and knew she could do. So there’s a part, as her daughter, that just feels moved by giving her that platform. I think she would be happy about it, and delighted by that collaboration, since I didn’t know her.
That was something she also missed out on. She really wanted kids, and so not being able to raise her kids, I think is like — obviously she’s gone, but I know when she was dying, she was really concerned about what’s gonna happen with her kids.
MovieMaker: Did you begin to feel closer to your mom by doing work that was similar to her work?
Seed: I realized in making the film that I was already doing work that was similar to her work. So it was more a process of discovering how much we were alike. I don’t think anything in my work changed as a result of getting to know her work. It was more just sort of a leveling, a parallel of, ‘Oh, we just have the same interest. We’re just generally on the same page.’ That’s what I discovered.
I mean, there are slight differences in her approach to my approach. I don’t know if she was interested in photojournalism per se, versus conceptual art. Maybe I’m a little bit more on the conceptual art side than she was, but that’s speculation.
MovieMaker: Tell me more about your background. How did you become a filmmaker?
Seed: I studied English literature and I started out in publishing and writing. Having grown up with my dad as a photographer, it was always kind of in the back of my mind as something I wanted to do. I did photography as a teenager and on. So I decided to pursue photography full time after my publishing writing work, because I didn’t want to sit at a desk anymore.
It was really through finding all these different materials that I realized it had to be more than just a photography project or a written thing. And so in like a flash, one day, it was like, ‘Okay, this is a film.’ But I didn’t know how to make one.
I literally remember Googling an example of a documentary treatment or budget. I hardly knew any filmmakers. No idea. I didn’t go to film school. So I was living in New York City, and then ultimately, I founded a group called the Brooklyn documentary Club, which, by the time I left New York, had 300-plus members. We met once a month for years.
Through that group, I had met tons of amazing filmmakers, and through Film Fatales, the women’s directors group, and the video consortium and all these other film groups, I kind of learned through collaborating and through listening and workshops with peers, and through the trial and error of making my own film and making some really stupid mistakes.
MovieMaker: What do you want audiences to take away from this?
Seed: It was such an emotionally challenging film for me to make. I wanted other people who either lost somebody or wanted to get deep into the weeds of photographic philosophies — people who really resonated with that, I wanted them to either have their own cathartic realizations or hope to get to know their person who they lost, or connect with them again. Or just spark deep conversations about why we use photography and what it’s for.
I just wanted audiences to connect on these deep levels, and just go off on their own paths. And that has actually happened. People tell me that now they’re going to go to that box of Super 8 that they haven’t been able to face of their father who passed away. Or now they’re going to go out and start taking pictures again, because they’ve been creatively blocked for five years. Things like that, to me, are like the best thing. I love hearing that from audience members.
Main Image: Sheila Turner Seed and Rachel Elizabeth Seed pictured in A Photographic Memory. Photo by cinematographer Drew Gardner courtesy of Seed.