A Photographic Memory

Synopsis

Through her decade-long quest to piece together fragments of her mother’s life, filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed offers a moving and intimate portrait of Sheila Turner-Seed, who died a few months after Rachel was born. In her lifetime, Sheila shirked societal expectations by exploring the world as a journalist and photographer. Through a wealth of pictures, home movies, television interviews, and newly discovered audio recordings of conversations with iconic photographers such as Henri-Cartier Bresson and Gordon Parks, Seed pays homage to the thrilling life and impressive work of her mother as an artist, best known for her groundbreaking series “Images of Man.”

With inventive visual compositions that play with both cinematic and photographic forms, a hint of humor, and a nod to her mother’s Chicago ties, Seed explores questions of legacy, memory, feminism, and modern photography while attempting to close the gap between herself and the mother she never knew.