When filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed first hears the recorded voice of her late mother Sheila Turner Seed, who died when she was only 18 months old, a long-buried sense of connection is instantly reawakened. Seed, also a photographer, has spent years trying to construct a portrait of Turner from the substantial archival materials she left behind following a career as an adventurous, globe-trotting journalist. Each element — Turner’s journals, the interviews she conducted, the television programs she appeared in, the photographs she took and her family’s home movies dating back to her childhood — adds depth to Seed’s vividly introspective documentary “A Photographic Memory.” But beyond the wealth of resources at her disposal, it’s the consistently meta and thematically relevant formal ingenuity Seed shrewdly deploys that make her debut a sumptuous piece of nonfiction.

Since she can only begin to know herself once she knows who her mother was, Seed creates a vehicle for self-discovery through the dissection of her most significant personal loss. Thus, the film functions as a dual examination that traverses past and present in an attempt to free Seed’s future from this primordial wound. Seed celebrates Turner’s numerous accomplishments in her field defying gender norms, but also investigates her humanity in the men she loved and those who loved her more, her complex familial ties, and in the urgency that propelled her to experience everything rapidly, almost as if she knew her time would be more limited than for most. Turner’s soft-spoken but determined demeanor, as captured in voice recorders and cameras, soon emerges as the most glaring similarity between mother and daughter.

Turner’s most notable work, “Images of Man,” a series of programs for Scholastic where she interviewed the world’s most renowned photographers during the ’60s and ’70s, serves as Seed’s most essential treasure trove to witness her mother in her element. Of those artists, it’s Henri Cartier-Bresson who becomes a recurrent voice in “A Photographic Memory,” as he engages with how the images that we capture attempt to preserve the futility of existence, to fend off the fear of disappearing into the void of obscurity. His musings directly speak to the miracle that Seed finds in the vast annals of frozen moments that get her closer to Turner. Seed travels to meet some of those photographers her mother interviewed or their surviving relatives and often talks to them in the same rooms where Turner once sat. Often during these encounters, people who knew her mother tell Seed how much she resembles her physically. The director leans into this for a cinematic reincarnation of Turner.

To exhibit the strikingly undeniable resemblance between them, Seed occasionally superimposes herself on a projected photo of her mother and later includes a montage of side-by-side photographs. There are dramatized segments in black-and-white that depict Turner conducting the interviews. In these instances, we hear Turner’s voice from the raw audio tapes, but her physical incarnation is Seed, now literally stepping into the character of her mother. And when taking excerpts from Turner’s journals, Seed uses her voice to bring them into the present.

Whenever Turner can’t be in the scene herself, Seed steps in to embody her. At one point, when speaking about moving to New York City just like her mother did, Seed edits audio of Turner asking questions and of herself answering them to imply a conversation between the two. “When I found your photos I saw we’ve been standing in the same place,” Seed tells Turner in this vortex she’s created through the manipulation of the vast amount of material (the project lists four different editors).

In crafting these atemporal exchanges and tracing Turner’s vibrant life, Seed realizes that the making of this documentary brings closure to her mother’s work and symbolizes the departure point for her own. It’s a bridge that, as much as possible, tries to vanish the decades that separated them. Early on, a touching sequence shows Seed beholding the few images that capture the brief moment when their timelines overlapped, the few months when Turner was not gone, and Seed still had a mother. And now, Seed has patched that heartbreak by understanding that parallels between them extend far outside physiology.

By scrutinizing Turner’s experiences, the filmmaker comes to terms with the difficulty of drawing lines between the personal and the professional in her own life, and questions whether every moment preserved should be for public consumption. These revelations partially come by analyzing of her photographer father Brian Seed’s faulty recollections and her relationship with her former husband, also a photographer.

Seed ultimately accepts the untrustworthy nature of memory, whether in our minds or recorded in still or moving images. Neither interpretation of the past can offer an objective view of what really happened, who we truly were. But the emotions those reminiscences evoke feel true to us. All that Seed can hope to get from observing her mother’s joys and predicaments, and in turn her own, is to safeguard an emotional truth, despite the gaps in the record.