PICTORIAL WORKS · BIOGRAPHY
Raghu Rai
Indian photographer and photojournalist, who is widely regarded as a pioneer of photojournalism in India and "India's most celebrated photojournalist"
"Mine was a happy family.
— from Mother Teresa
Most acclaimed
Mother Teresa
When Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa (1910-1997) in October 2003, Magnum photographer Raghu Rai had already paid homage to the extraordinary sister and her exemplary destiny. Know for his numerous reportages on India, especially on Bhopal, Rai met Mother Teresa in the early 1970s. Fascinated by someone who, from the age of twelve, was fully aware of her "mission," he continued to photograph her until her death in 1997. In 1928, when she was only eighteen, she left Macedonia to join the Sisters of Loreto, a community of nuns in Ireland with missions in India. After a few month' training in Dublin, she was sent to India, where on May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun, choosing the name Teresa in honor of Saint Theresa of Lisieux. From 1931 to 1948, Mother Teresa taught in Kolkata (Calcutta), but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working in the slums of Kolkata. In October 1950, seh started her own order, Thhe Missionaries of Charity, whose primary thask was to love and care for those persons nobody else was prepared to look after. Less than two years after her death, Pope John Paul II permitted the opening of her Cause of Canonization. On December 20, 2002, a decree approved Mother Teresa's heroic virtues and the miracle attributed to her intercession. The relationship of trust that Raghu Rai and Mother Teresa gradually built up is very apparent in the photographer's work. He observed her daily life and that of her community, successfully conveying its prayerful intensity and strength of Kolkata, where the everpresent poverty and distress illustrated the need for Mother Teresa's work. With nearly a hundred black-and-white photographs, punctuated by anecdotal texts that recall their encounters, Rai has captured the strength of Mother Teresa's commitment and her daily fight against poverty.
His Holiness
His Holiness is at once compelling journalism, drama, history, and biography. John Paul II, elected as the first non-Italian pope in five hundred years, readily used his global pulpit to speak out on behalf of human rights and those who were ignored by other world leaders - whether politically or economically oppressed, whether in the Communist or non-Communist world. Born in a small Polish town where 20 percent of the population was Jewish, and later bishop of the diocese that contained Auschwitz, John Paul II was painfully aware of the horrors of anti-Semitism, and as pope he forced the Vatican to recognize the state of Israel. With an iron will, Wojtyla (whose rise in the Church was accelerated by his studies and writings on sexual practices) set the Catholic Church on an unmistakable theological course in regard to dogma, the role of women, sexuality, contraception, abortion, and the unmitigated power of the pope himself. In the process, he has both divided and uplifted the world's one billion Catholics, and made the Church again a huge force in the temporal world. . Drawing on hundreds of interviews with the key players in Rome, Washington, Moscow, and Warsaw, Bernstein and Politi tell this amazing story, recreating the remarkable character of a boy who turned to God after losing all of his closest family members, and whose unbelievable destiny was shaped by a youth in the midst of Nazi (and later Communist) Europe. The narrative excitement of Bernstein's reporting skills in conjunction with Politi's insightful knowledge of the Vatican and the former Soviet Union (which he covered for Il Messaggero while the Berlin Wall crumbled) reveal the real story behind the end of the cold war and produce the definitive portrait of the great moral leader - however controversial - of our time.