Traveling with Mother

It started in the early 1980s, when Marie Constantin, a Baton Rouge photographer and Business Report contributor, volunteered with the St. Agnes soup kitchen and met the sisters there.

“The regional superior and I became close friends, and whenever Mother Teresa would come to our country, [the superior] would invite me to photograph Mother Teresa and the sisters,” Constantin says.

This continued for about 13 years, with the artist often being one of the only photographers invited along with Mother Teresa’s entourage during her travels across the United States. Her association with one of the world’s most revered religious figures is not something Constantin has exploited with speeches or books or other products. She has proven incredibly protective of the images she captured on the road with the late Catholic missionary to India.

Many of these rare, behind-the-scenes black-and-white images are being shown for the first time as part of a group exhibit at the Alexandria Museum of Art. One was even chosen by the Vatican as the official photo for the Beatification of Mother Teresa, part of the canonization process.

The show continues this month until Feb. 22. For more on the Alexandria museum, go to themuseum.org. To view Constantin’s work, visit marieconstantin.com.