(Log Line): A film about photography .... and a lifelong exploration of what it means to belong.
(Short) Seeking the Light: A Life in Photography is an intimate seventeen-minute documentary portrait of photographer Mary Motley Kalergis and the questions that have shaped her work over the last fifty years: How are human connections formed and sustained? What happens when they are tested or broken? And what does it mean to belong? Exploring themes ranging from childbirth, marriage, adoption and adolescence to immigration, race and marginalized communities, Kalergis immersed herself in the lives of the hundreds of people. Through photographs, interviews, journals, memories and her own words, Seeking the Light becomes more than the story of a photographer’s career. It is a meditation on photography as an act of attention—and on the possibility that truly seeing another person may be the beginning of understanding.
(Long) Seeking the Light: A Life in Photography is an intimate seventeen-minute documentary portrait of photographer Mary Motley Kalergis and the questions that have shaped her work over the last fifty years: How are human connections formed and sustained? What happens when they are tested or broken? And what does it mean to belong?Narrated in part by Mary and in part by her husband and lifelong witness, David, the film traces these questions to her childhood in the segregated Virginia of the 1950’s and ’60’s, where LIFE magazine photo essays opened a window onto lives far beyond her own privileged, small-town Southern upbringing. The work of Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith and other documentary photographers revealed to her that a camera could expose suffering and injustice while also finding dignity, beauty and intimacy.Those early discoveries began a lifetime of looking and listening. Exploring themes ranging from childbirth, marriage, adoption and adolescence to immigration, race and marginalized communities, Kalergis immersed herself in the lives of the hundreds of people she photographed, often working for months or years to create the trust on which her long-form documentary work depends.Through photographs, interviews, journals, memories and her own words, Seeking the Light becomes more than the story of a photographer’s career. It is a meditation on photography as an act of attention—and on the possibility that truly seeing another person may be the beginning of understanding.