India, Aug. 20 -- We have arrived at the 80th Independence Day, and World Photography Day, first proposed by OP Sharma, a Delhi-based photography teacher, is observed in the same month. Independence was also a claim to authorship, a newly independent country deciding it would no longer be described by somebody else's visual storytelling.

Photography arrived in India in 1840, and for decades after, its record was largely made by people who did not live inside the country, and what got published was rarely made by an Indian photographer. It is worth asking whether the work of reclaiming authorship is finished, or whether it has changed shape into something harder to see.

On the surface, the answer seems to be yes, since a billion phones h...