Two naked boys with woman, from the series Rx Adventure/Healing

Mary Ellen Mark’s images of Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity capture unsettling yet moving details of the human condition. But they also share the gritty, documentary realism found in the Bengali-language films of Parallel Cinema made by Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, showcasing abject poverty and violence in the Global South.

Here, two emasculated, visually challenged boys sitting on their haunches have probably just been bathed in a Benares (now known as Varanasi, or Kashi) center. The nun shakes off the water upon finishing her bathing duty. Perhaps they would have been able to sense there is a stranger in their midst, privy to their ritual of ablution.

In his introduction to Mark’s photobook Missions of Charity in Calcutta, David Featherstone notes that even though her Nobel Prize placed the Missionaries on a surer financial footing, critics have argued that Mother Teresa’s work did little to dismantle structural inequities or aid in world peace. He writes, “with the strange twist typical of the Western news industry . . . [she] became a figure of mass media mythology.” He points out that her visits to man-made disasters may have garnered beneficial public attention but could also be used opportunistically for celebrity photo ops, or, co-opted as simplistic beauty pageant platitudes.

—Ayesha Matthan, PhD candidate