There are many paths taken by the things we leave behind when we die. They may find their way to an estate sale or a rack at Goodwill, take pride of place on a mantel or a lovingly curated album, or make a new home on the collarbone or ring finger of a descendent. Then, there are the things that remain preserved, almost as if waiting for the right moment to be found.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]When journalist and photographer Sheila Turner Seed died suddenly of a brain aneurysm at the age of 42 in 1978, her husband, photographer Brian Seed, was left to raise their 18-month-old daughter Rachel Elizabeth Seed alone. Growing up without her mother, Rachel says she had only “a very basic idea” of Sheila, gleaned through the carousel of stories her father told on repeat. As she grew up, inheriting her parents’ visual talents and becoming a photographer in her own right, she yearned to understand the mother she never knew. She’d long known that her mother had left work behind, but it wasn’t until her late 20s that she discovered the full extent of it: some 300,000 photographs, hundreds of pages of journal entries, and more than 50 hours of audio reels, all waiting to be pored over and listened to. Contained within this analog treasure trove was a personality, a voice, a way of looking at the world—in short, a life.
And Seed didn’t have to go very far to find it. In early 2011, she was hired to complete an inventory of the audiovisual archives housed within New York City’s International Center of Photography. The ICP—founded by her father’s one-time mentor and her parents’ close friend, the legendary photographer Cornell Capa—had commissioned the project that represented the pinnacle of Sheila’s career, Images of Man. Sheila had traveled the world to sit down with the world’s most renowned photographers, from Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris to Bruce Davidson in New York. When Rachel asked her dad what had become of the raw materials behind the project, he initially thought they might have been lost. But he told her that he’d sent them to Capa after Sheila’s death, so perhaps they were hidden in a basement somewhere after all.
And hidden, they were. “Lo and behold, there were 12 boxes sitting there like a time capsule,” she says. “Like a present waiting to be unwrapped.” The arduous, emotional process of unwrapping that present would soon give way to a project of Seed’s own, a film called A Photographic Memory, which is rolling out theatrically throughout the summer following a run of festival showings; its New York City release begins on June 27. The movie poses a profound question: whether it’s possible to build a relationship with a person once they’re gone, through the evidence of the life they left behind. It took over a decade to answer, but Seed concluded that you can. Or at least, she could, and finally has.
Excavating a life
The first of Sheila’s interviews that Seed listened to was with Cornell Capa himself, while sitting in his old office. His colleagues at ICP had left it untouched after he died in 2008: his pencil jar just so, a photograph of his older brother, famed photographer Robert Capa, hanging on the wall. Sitting in Capa’s chair, hearing her mother’s voice, Seed says, there was only one way to describe the sensation: “I felt like I was time-traveling.” The audio was so rich and clear, she says, “that I felt like I was literally in the room with them, like time ceased to exist.”
Among the greatest pleasures of listening to the reels were the everyday moments that punctuated the musings of the medium’s 20th century greats. “She was interviewing Cartier-Bresson, and his little daughter wandered into the room, and all of a sudden, Cartier-Bresson is talking in a baby voice: ‘Oh, Mélanie, oh!’” says Seed. “And my mom is cooing at the baby.” This last observation—Sheila’s interaction with a little girl, born just a few years before her own daughter—was just one of many Seed would eventually compile into a mental collage of her mother’s personality.
As she went through the interviews, Seed encountered another strange feeling: “Her voice was familiar to me.” It had been more than 30 years since she’d heard it, as a toddler, but it was cataloged somewhere among her preverbal memories. When Rachel and Brian spoke to TIME a decade ago, at the precipice of this project, she said of the excavation process: “It seems like there’s a kind of communication going on that’s not conscious, a sort of innate connection.”
Seed’s process was a multilayered, multimedia one, viewing negatives through a magnifying glass, reading journals, listening to reels and gradually blending them into a cohesive vision of a life. There was only one relic in which her mother’s voice and image were married, a recorded interview Sheila gave about her own work at City College of New York in 1973. “I was really surprised when I saw that interview because, based on everything I had been told, I thought she was kind of square, nerdy, bookish. Her family said she was bad at sports.” But that’s not what she saw in the footage. “She’s very comfortable in her own skin, very self-possessed, very confident. She was just so cool. And that was genuinely surprising.”
Developing a relationship
It’s one thing to learn about a person’s interests and quirks, and quite another to feel that you are in an active relationship with them. A relationship is, by definition, a two-way street. How can that exist if one person’s no longer living? Part of the answer, for Seed, could be found in the very tools she was using to make the movie.
“At a certain point, maybe about halfway through, I started to have conversations with her. If I was going through something challenging, I would get to a quiet place and then ask her a question. Then I would wait, and she would respond.” The advice she received this way, she says, was wiser than any she could find among the living. Seed captured the essence of these conversations in the film by isolating the audio of Sheila’s interview questions and responding in her own voice, in voiceover interspersed throughout the movie.
Does she believe her mother was really responding to her? Absolutely, says Seed, who describes herself as having been the kind of kid who would hold seances with Ouija boards. She sees their conversations not only in a sort of mystical realm, but much like the way AI is trained by being fed reams of information. “It’s like I was the AI engine,” she says. By consuming all the materials Sheila left behind, “I programmed myself with her.”
“The underlying experiment I was doing in the film was: how can I build a relationship with her, just through interacting with, absorbing, processing all these materials? How far can I take that?” In the film, these conversations build to a magical finale best left to experience while watching. Once Seed came up with the idea for this final shot, the goal became to “make a film that was worthy of the ending.”
She came away from the process with a deep appreciation for the power of these materials, and of cinema itself. “Why do we go to the movies? To be transported.”
Making a film
A Photographic Memory might technically be categorized as a documentary, but it is also a memoir, a collage, a diary of a decade-plus soul-searching journey. Co-written and edited by Christopher Stoudt, Seed’s film weaves together her mother’s diary entries and images, home videos she obtained from Sheila’s family, interviews with family members, former colleagues, an ex-fiancé, and, of course, Brian, who spent much of his career, before and after meeting Sheila, working for LIFE, TIME, and Sports Illustrated.
There are also scenes of Seed herself absorbing her mother’s archives and grappling with what she’s learning, actively trying to put the pieces in place. Seed, who has long been told she bears a striking resemblance to her mother, portrays her mother in reenactments of her interviews with photographers, edited with the audio from those conversations so that the viewer feels they are watching the original discussions play out. She visits some of those photographers and their family members to gather their recollections of Sheila.
The result is dreamy, emotionally profound, pervaded by a sense of curiosity and profound care. Seed lists among her inspirations Chris Marker’s 1962 featurette La Jetée, which builds a narrative over still photographs; Jonathan Caouette’s raw, visceral, 2003 documentary film essay Tarnation; the late photojournalist Tim Hetherington’s 2010 doc Diary; and Sarah Polley’s acclaimed Stories We Tell (2012), in which the filmmaker sensitively investigates the truth of her family lineage. Kirsten Johnson, lauded for such personal docs as Cameraperson and Dick Johnson Is Dead, is among its executive producers.
Central to making A Photographic Memory was deciding how much of Sheila to include. Reading her mother’s journals, Seed acted as a posthumous arbiter of her privacy, asking in those conversations with Sheila which aspects she’d feel comfortable sharing with the world.
She had to ask herself the same questions. Or, more accurately, she asked many test audiences who screened unfinished versions of the film. “The repeated comment was, ‘But how does Rachel feel about this? And what does Rachel think about this?’ And I would bristle with that, because I thought I was doing more and more, but it was never enough.” That feedback pushed her to include, with his permission, her ex-husband, who she was in the process of divorcing, as well as intimate discussions over whether she wanted to be a mother herself.
“I saw myself as a character in the film, and that helped me to know that it’s sort of an avatar that we need for the story, and we’re only going to put as much in as is needed.” Part of why the film took more than 10 years to finish is that Seed needed to know how she was going to feel at the end of the process. “That had to go into the film. So I had to live through it in order to make the film.”
A sense of closure
Seed tells of an epiphany she had in a gallery, looking at a photograph by Louis Hine, who famously documented child labor in the early 20th century. Looking at the image, which exuded empathy for its subject, she realized, “I wasn’t looking so much at the kid. I was looking at Lewis Hine’s gaze. I got, in that moment, his whole energy and who he was as a photographer.” She brought that revelation to her mother’s photographs, too. “Any good art has, within it, the viewer, the creator. When I looked at her 300,000 images, I was also looking for who she was through her eyes, what was interesting to her to photograph.”
Seed got what she needed from making the film, and now she gets to share her mother with the world. “In Jewish tradition, when you remember somebody, they continue to live,” she says. “People will know her because of the film, and she will live on.”
Now, Seed is working on six different film projects as a producer or consultant, including a documentary about the photographer Larry Fink and his daughter. None are as personal as the one she’s just finished, nor does she feel a need to go anywhere like that again anytime soon. Besides, she describes herself as “a helicopter mom” to A Photographic Memory, taking an active role in managing its rollout and helping the film reach as many viewers as possible.
As Seed says in the film, it’s harder now, knowing the full extent of what she missed out on without her mother around to raise her. But she tries not to dwell on the sorrow. It is, she says, “the same as longing to be back in a photograph.” That may be a metaphysical impossibility, but cinema sure can come pretty close to the real thing.
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