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A photographer lands with a commission already in hand, National Geographic, an NGO report, a supplement for a paperback in the West. The licence precedes the photographer. Before the plane touches down, the story has more or less been decided in an editorial meeting somewhere in Washington or London. On the ground there is a fixer, someone who knows which official clears the temple permission, which road survives July, so that by the time the photographer arrives, it has been cleared for them like a table set before a guest walks in.

Then there is the skin the passport comes in, and the currency behind it. A per diem in dollars stretches long where the rupee moves slowly against it, enough to hire the fixer, the driver, the translator, and still call the trip “modest” back home. The captions will say the photographer spent weeks living among the community. Technically true. Yet it erases everything that made those weeks possible.

This is the older colonial arrangement wearing a new masthead, the publication deciding what India is worth photographing this year, poverty or spirituality or their collision, always legible to a reader who has never been. A photographer without that licence spends a year earning the trust a fixer can manufacture in an afternoon. The apparatus is built to make extraction feel like immersion.

Sunil Janah never had that apparatus, and he is worth starting with because he shows how differently this can go. In 1943, P.C. Joshi, general secretary of the Communist Party of India, pulled him out of college in Calcutta and sent him into West Bengal to photograph the famine, and the pictures ran in the party’s own paper, not a magazine that had decided the story before he left.

Janah called the famine entirely man-made, a policy dressed as tragedy, and he was 25 and believed completely in what he was doing. The camera was not the point. The belief was the point: evidence in an argument he was already making with his life. Which is perhaps why, when the party expelled him in 1948, the rupture went deeper than politics and something quieter entered the work.

His collaborator on some of that early work was Margaret Bourke-White, in many ways his mirror opposite. Her belief lived inside the photograph itself, portable in a way that Janah’s........

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