THE LOCAL LENS
THOM NICKELS
When Pope Francis
canonizes Mother Teresa on Sunday, September 4, one man will be smiling more
than most in the sea of people in Saint Peter’s Square.
His name is Michael
Collopy, one of the preeminent portrait photographers of our time. Collophy was
Mother Teresa’s personal friend and official photographer for fifteen years.
His 224 page book of photographs, Works
of Love are Works of Peace (Ignatius Press), contain more than 180 fine art
quality tri-tone images, along with writings by Mother Teresa. One of Collopy’s
images of Mother Teresa has been chosen as the Catholic Church’s official
portrait of the new saint. Collopy’s
photograph was the basis for a painted portrait of the nun that will be
unveiled to the world on September 4. .
Collopy, a mostly
self taught photographer who studied under Ansel Adams and Richard Avedon,
resides in San Francisco with his
wife, Alma and their two sons. He has photographed a lot of famous people,
including Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail
Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela, but he says that no subject
affected him as much as Mother Teresa. As a personal friend of the saint’s, he also
spent a lot of time driving her around Calcutta
to her various appointments.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t
think of something she said,” he tells me by phone from his home. “She was very
mystical. She could ‘read’ you in a way. She had these deep penetrating eyes
and she often gave me spiritual advice that was straight on.”
Collopy also wants
me to know that Mother Teresa “had the ability to see goodness in each person
without judgment.”
The most extreme
example of this is the love that she and her Missionaries of Charity sisters showed
to gay men dying of AIDS in the Bay Area in the 1980s and 1990s. Collopy’s book
contains a number of startling images from the sisters’ Gift of Love San
Francisco AIDS Hospice. These black and white images are images of AIDS
patients close to death... Some of the men are photographed as they lay dying.
In one striking photograph we see Hospice patient “David” surrounded by sisters
and staff as if cocooned in a loving circle. As Collopy wrote: “His name was
David. Like the other men whose photographs appear in this section, when David
found out about this book project, he wanted to be involved. So we were there
at a most intimate and profound—his death.”
One image shows
David in repose in a small cot, a white sheet up to his neck near an open window
with white curtains and a white statue of Our Lady of Fatima looking over the
scene.
“I got to know all
of these guys quite well,” Collopy says. “Mother was one of the first to really
have a home for men suffering from AIDS. I met so many men there who were
rejected by their families because of who they were, so many beautiful people
that I got to know.” Collopy adds that
David told him that while living in the streets he didn’t feel like he had
family or friends but that in the hospice he was surrounded by friends.
“Mother had
complete trust and confidence that the men in the AIDS hospice were all going
to heaven. How intimately God loves each one of us. Mother also made it a point
never to judge anyone, and she once told Michael, ‘Oh no, I never judge anybody
because it doesn’t allow me to love them.’”
“Not having this
judgment,” Collopy adds, “allowed her to love the individuals she cared for.
Mother had the ability to see goodness in each person, without judgment. There
was a lot of love and laughter in those hospices.”
How did Mother
Teresa become Mother Teresa?
She was born in Albania
as Ganxhe Agnes Bojaxhiu and had an older brother and a sister named Aga. The family was well to do. Her mother, an
Orthodox Christian, was very religious while her father was very active
politically in the local City Council, a position that probably led to his
death, or so Collopy believes, as he may have been poisoned. By age 18, the
future Mother Teresa was already leading a devout religious life and reading
books on India
because she had a desire to work there. She wanted to devote her life to the
poor as a nun and the only way to do that was to join the Catholic Sisters of
Loreto (there were no Orthodox missionary nuns in India
at that time).
Collopy says that
Mother Teresa received the call to work with the very poor during a train ride
to Darjeeling in 1946. “At that
time she had a kind of interior locution, a vision of Jesus and Mary. She was
suddenly looking out over a sea of dark faces of the poor and in the foreground
was Jesus on the cross,” he says. After entering the convent, she became a
geography teacher and the principal of a girl’s school in Calcutta .
Collopy tells me that
Mother never liked to talk about herself and never accepted any kind of praise.
When she started her work in Calcutta ,
she was on her own and absolutely alone. It wasn’t until British writer Malcolm
Muggeridge discovered her work in 1969, leading to a BBC
report on her work that resulted in world wide attention.
Deceased writer
Christopher Hitchens, author of a book on Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position,” says the BBC
report was the beginning of “the Mother Teresa media myth.” Hitchens called
Mother Teresa an “ally of the status quo,” because of her readiness to meet
infamous world dictators to further her work. Other critics of Mother jumped on
the bandwagon, including journalists who insisted that her Missionaries of
Charity homes for the dying in Calcutta
and elsewhere were understaffed, provided bad medical care, were too crowded
and had insufficient pain killers and food. Mother’s Missionaries of Charity
were also charged with gross financial mismanagement. Krithika Varagur of the Huffington Post went out on a limb when she wrote: “…Mother Teresa’s
imminent sainthood is freshly infuriating. We make god in our image and we see
holiness in those who resemble us. In this, Mother Teresa’s image is a relic of
white, Western supremacy.” These and
other critics who criticized Mother Teresa’s looks as well as her stand against
abortion were taken aback when she was awarded the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and the
Medal of Freedom.
Collopy says that
when he and Christopher Hitchens were in Berkeley
at the same time, somebody tried to get them together for lunch. “I had a
conversation with him on the phone, and he was very nice, very articulate, but
his criticism of Mother certainly wasn’t accurate based on my 15 years with
her.”
The aged nun, after
all, lived in a simple room without any amenities, wore broken sandals that
were five years old, refused to use the telephone longer than a few minutes
because poor people in India had no access to phones.
“I never met
anybody who was that selfless. Her life was a life of selfless service. She did
not desire publicity or fame. In fact, she had a deal with God that for every
photo taken of her a soul was released from purgatory. You know, when you
consider the life of Jesus—he did not hang out with the best of characters—a
far more difficult pain for him to accept other than the physical pain he
experienced was the pain of rejection from the apostles at the Garden of Gethsemane.
This really corresponds to the poverty of sorrow that Mother saw in the West.
It was the poverty of being unloved and uncared for that made the poverty in
the United States
much more difficult to care for. But she was called to attend to that.”
Collopy tells me of the time he was driving
Mother to one of her appointments when they came upon a group of electricians
working on electrical wires. The scene moved Mother to say, “You have to be the
empty wire and allow God to be the current that runs through it.”
I ask about the photographs
of Mother’s feet and hands. The images of Mother’s feet are shocking to look at
because they do not resemble feet but, as Collopy says, “tree roots.”
“Yes, the sisters
used to encourage me to photograph Mother’s feet. She never used to wear
sandals in her house in Calcutta ,
because the poor didn’t have sandals. She had an extra toe under her right
foot. That must have been very painful. But her feet looked like tree roots.
There were notches on her ankles from the way that she prayed, the prostrations
and so forth…”
He says there are
many times when he feels Mother’s presence. In one instance a good friend of Alma ’s
announced that she had breast cancer. Because the woman was very distraught, Collopy
immediately drove to her home to give her a small medal of Our Lady that Mother
used to hand out to people. Mother would
kiss these medals individually then distribute them to pilgrims and the sick. Sometimes
she would leave them on the property of buildings that were for sale that she
wanted to buy. According to Collopy, “99.9 percent of the time after she would
get that house.”
After delivering the medal to his wife’s
friend, Collopy tells me that the very next day the more than grateful woman
drove to the Collopy home to make an announcement. She said that when she
received the medal on the previous day, she saw Mother Teresa standing in the
room. Shortly after this, his breast cancer
vanished completely.
Collopy reminds me
of something that Mother once said: “I can do much more for you in heaven than
I can on earth.”
The San Francisco
photo-journalist is currently working on a new book, Courage, portraits of people he feels have exhibited courage in
their field of work, including Nobel Prize Laureates, Civil Rights heroes, and
of course the Dalai Lama, who once rubbed Collopy’s shoulder because he said he
needed the healing presence of Mother Teresa’s love.
