The Power of Images To Change Lives

Marie Constantin, the photographer, and author of Finding Calcutta: Memoirs of a Photographer, understands images have power, more power than words alone to impact lives.

It was an image in a documentary film that turned Constantin’s life completely around in the early 1990’s. She was a young journalist, completely focused on establishing her career and partying with friends when an image of Mother Teresa holding a starving person flashed across the t.v. screen with the words, “God didn’t do this; we do it because we do not share what we have”. Suddenly tears streamed down Constantin’s face. The very next day she found herself washing dishes in a soup kitchen run by Mother Teresa’s nuns in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was one photo of Mother Teresa on t.v. which catapulted her into volunteering with the sisters and opened the door to her calling…

Photo caption: Snapshot from one of my trips to the Rio Grande — Big Bend National Park hot springs with with wild mustangs on the Mexican bank.

We knew this was coming, but it doesn’t make it any easier. Trespassing on private soil, our own Army Corps of Engineers (ACoE) have begun clearing areas for the border wall. Rather than steal land legally through eminent domain, they have arrived without permission or notification. Instead of cutting through ranchland, they have begun where it will hurt the most — nature preserves. The first location to fall beneath the saw, machete, and blade is a strip through the National Butterfly Center. Scientists had purchased the area from farmers and restored it with plant species vital to the survival of the threatened monarch butterfly. Now, only brown stubble remains. The wall will block the migration of thousands of land-based animals, cutting their territory…