Photographs of Mother Teresa's Missions of Charity in Calcutta, India

In 1978 Life magazine sent Mary Ellen Mark to Calcutta to photograph the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the pictures were meant to accompany a profile of her. Mark returned in January 1981 and stayed two months, this time without a magazine’s deadline driving the work. Thirty-five black-and-white photographs drawn from those two stays form the substance of this book: the order’s wards and dispensaries, the people it shelters and tends, and the city around them.

The volume was published in 1985 by The Friends of Photography in Carmel, California, as a forty-eight-page paperback, and it takes its place in the foundation’s Untitled series, numbered 39. James Alinder and David Featherstone are named among the book’s contributors alongside Mark, situating the photographs within the institution’s broader argument about documentary practice rather than presenting them as reportage alone. The plates are sequenced as a sustained encounter with a single institution, not a survey of a career.

What distinguishes the work is the double vantage. The first visit answers a magazine’s brief and the glare of a Nobel announcement; the second is slower, undertaken by a photographer who chose to go back. Mark’s attention falls on labour, illness, and the ordinary recurrence of care, and on the faces of those receiving it. The photographs raise the questions that have always shadowed compassionate documentary — who is looking, on whose behalf, and what the picture does for the person in it — without settling them.

The book belongs to an early, formative period for Mark, well before the wider recognition that followed Indian Circus in 1993. It is now out of print, and copies circulate as the modest softcover it always was; the value for a collection lies in the concentration of the sequence and in the pairing of commissioned and self-directed looking within a single, restrained volume. For anyone tracing how American documentary photography of the 1980s handled poverty and religious charity, this is a compact and telling example.