Signature: Marie Josephine Constantin

Marie Constantin’s clients need to let her walk around. They need to let the veteran photographer be spacy. “When I’m quiet, they think I’m stumped and start throwing out ideas,” she says. “But you’ve got to get your brain into creative mode and out of the side that doesn’t let you create. Being told to shoot x, y and z would be like me telling you to write a story using these 10 verbs.”

This is an astute, intuitive observation from a photographer who didn’t realize she wanted to be one until she was 32 and working for the LSU Catholic. Soon after, her portraits of Bishop Stanley Ott earned her regular assignments from 225’s sister publication, Baton Rouge Business Report.

Age: 59

Title: Photographer

Hometown: Hartford, Conn.

While volunteering in a soup kitchen run by Missionaries of Charity, Constantin was asked to photograph Mother Teresa on several visits to Washington, D.C., New York City and along the East Coast. The photographer traveled with the now-beatified nun off and on for 13 years, including three life-changing trips to the slums of Calcutta. When Mother Teresa died in 1997, CBS Sunday Morning featured Constantin and 20 of her photographs. The Vatican unfurled a giant version of one of Constantin’s images before 200,000 people at Mother Teresa’s beatification.

“I love photographing missionaries because they suffer so much for the services they give,” says Constantin, whose great aunt worked as a missionary. “They get diseases, they get malaria and they live without electricity.”

Constantin has twice tried writing a book about her time with Mother Teresa. When things grew too commercial, she backed out. Recently she began setting words to her remarkable portraits of a remarkable servant. This time, the book is for her nieces and nephews. “Since I abandoned this commercial idea, I really love what I’ve written. It’s from the heart.”

Since the 1980s, Constantin has traveled widely, but she always returns to Baton Rouge. She has photographed every corner and character in the city for more than 25 years. She relishes riding her Vespa around Spanish Town and daytrips to the artist colony at Arnaudville.

“It’s always been friendly here,” she says. “Now it’s friendly and beautiful, friendly and interesting, friendly and full of art. I think we’re very fortunate; we’re like a little secret.”

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