Dispensary just outside Calcutta, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity

Artist Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940–2015)

Date1981

MediumGelatin silver print Edition 4/25

DimensionsImage: 12 11/16 × 19 inches (32.2 × 48.3 cm);
Sheet: 15 7/8 × 20 inches (40.3 × 50.8 cm)

ClassificationsPhotographs

Credit LineGift of Dr. Diana Wisdom and Gabriel Wisdom, in honor of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Class of 1954

Terms

Photographs
American

Object number2020.019.019

Label CopyMary Ellen Mark documented the pioneering work of the Albanian-born Indian Catholic nun known as Mother Teresa (1910–1997), who received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1979. Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 in Calcutta, West Bengal, after moving there in the 1930s. With the Bengal Famine of 1943 and the Partition of India in 1947, she would have been witness to these cataclysmic events and their ripple effects, which continued to the time of Mark’s images.

This is a distressing scene of ailing subjects, worn out like their clothes, awaiting their turn to receive care. On the left is a grim man who helplessly holds a sick baby, its tiny arm dangling and head tilted back. On the right, an older man holds a medicine bottle and a prescription, face and body stricken with affliction, and eyes seemingly closed in debility. Hovering at a distance outside is an emaciated mother with a child, blurred and ghostly in the light.

Mark seems to capture an endless stream of suffering patients who have barely made it to the dispensary traveling great distances on foot or unreliable public transport.

—Ayesha Matthan, PhD candidate

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