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I should say at the outset that I am not a disinterested reader of this book. I am in it. In her third chapter, Buthpitiya names me – the Indian photographer who, refused entry by the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) at the height of the Indian intervention, slipped the media ban and spent a few days inside the Tigers’ lines to make the only unauthorised pictures of that phase of the war. She quotes my own account of what I saw there, down to the boys rifling a dead soldier’s pockets; she lingers on two portraits I made of the Tiger leader, Prabhakaran, which she says still circulate today.

I came to A Volatile Picture, then, already standing inside its frame – an uncomfortable place from which to judge a book, and, it turns out, the most honest one. For this is a study of what photographs do after the photographer has put the camera down: how they travel, mutate, get recaptioned and reused, outlive both the wound and the witness. I have watched my own images do precisely that. To read Vindhya Buthpitiya is to be handed, with great care and scholarship, an account of your own dispossession.

A Volatile Picture: War and the Political Work of Photography in Sri Lanka, Vindhya Buthpitiya, University of Washington Press, June 2026.

The first thing to say about the book is how deliberately it looks away from people like me. The literature of war photography is usually organised around the famous frame of the foreign correspondent – the celebrated image, the man who flew in, the trophy that became a career.

Buthpitiya turns her back on all of that. Her subject is the photography Tamils made of themselves and for themselves: the studio portrait, the identity-card headshot, the garlanded memorial frame with its battery-powered fairy lights, the wedding album assembled to satisfy a visa officer, the phone selfie taken against a banner of atrocities, the geotag that stitches a scattered people back into a map of a country that no longer admits them. It is a book about the vernacular image – the ordinary, the domestic, the bureaucratic – and that reorientation is its real originality.

There is a quiet irony in a war photographer reviewing a book constructed to see past the war photographer, and I think the book is right to do it. The famous frame has had its century. The headshot in the laminate of a dead man’s identity card has not had its due.

This way of seeing places Buthpitiya within a wider turn in the study of photography – one that grew out of a project asking how ordinary people use the camera as a form of........

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