Mother Teresa: A Life of Dedication

Raghu Rai captures the athmosphere, the love in gestures, the rapport of this extraordinary saint with her environment.

Great !!!

One icon has been shot into life by another.

As the previous reviewer says, this is a work of love, of seeking after spiritual light in a most universal way. The pictures are interspersed with Raghu Rai’s ‘paens’ to her, a dialogue conducted in the first person with her living memory. The barriers between photographer and subject, between faiths traditions, between men and women fall away, the anxious gap between the troubled ‘objectivity’ of photography and spiritual response are bridged. She goes from thundering at him (for taking a transcendant snapshot, reproduced in the book, of three sisters at prayer over a billowing curtain, in the middle of her first being introduced to him as a young man) to accepting his photography as being capable, like her own labours, of being in service of love, and never quite capturing it. Once, he is caught photographing her sisters at confession, but her indignation turns to acceptance as she hears him, and Rai clearly feels, truly hears him:“What were you doing in the sisters’ area?” she demands.He explains to her that “that while taking pictures I was neither a man nor a woman, I was just a photographer.” There is an unconscious, natural echo of “there is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female…” between this lady who described herself as 'by birth Albanian, by citizenship Indian, and by faith a Catholic nun, and this Indian photographer. She takes his reasonings, and his prayers, as seriously as her own. She spoke always of the importance of 'touch'. These photographs touch. To see this happen through a set of photographs, taken over decades by someone of Raghu Rai’s gifts, is unexpected and wonderful. It is to realize that those gifts are also spiritual.

This is an exquisite work of art and yes even of love. Mr. Rai is a renown photographer who had unprecedented access to Mother Teresa, the Missionaries of Charity and a number of the houses in Calcutta over many years. The book is large format, coffee table style book filled with large beautiful cephia tone images.