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 citizenship. A Volatile Picture is its Sri Lankan chapter. An anthropologist at the University of St Andrews and co-editor of Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination, she has built this book over nearly a decade – a doctorate, then a run of essays – on fieldwork in Jaffna and the Vanni begun in 2017. The publisher calls it the first in-depth study of Tamil photographic practices on the island, and I have no reason to doubt it.Put simply, beneath the theory she marshals, her argument is that a photograph is not a record but an actor. It does things. The same image can recruit a martyr, mourn a daughter, and indict a government, depending entirely on whose hands hold it and what caption sits beneath it. This is what she means by volatile: the image is unstable, combustible, never finished. A studio portrait shot for a marriage proposal becomes, years later, the face a mother holds up at a roadside protest because her boy walked into an army camp and never walked out. An identity photograph imposed by the state to make a population legible is turned back against that state as evidence of the lives it erased.Also read: Berlin Wall: Secret Police Files and the Memories of Two GermaniesButhpitiya moves through these afterlives with a patient, forensic attention, and the cumulative effect is to make you see the photograph not as a still thing but as something with a life of its own, still circulating, still doing political work long after the moment it froze has passed.I recognised this argument before she had finished making it, because it had already happened to me. An image I made of thirteen Indian soldiers killed in a Jaffna lane became, in the years that followed, a slide in conference rooms I never entered, captioned in language I never wrote, illustrating arguments I had not made. Once, in Geneva, I watched it appear on a screen above a presenter’s head, labelled a generic “escalatory incident,” my name nowhere on it. The photograph had been freed of its maker.Buthpitiya’s book is itself a witness to this. On my own page she records that my portraits of Prabhakaran – likened, she notes, to the Che Guevara image the man himself admired – keep circulating, resurfacing on Instagram, shared by Tamil youth in the diaspora who were not born when I made them. The picture has acquired a life, an audience, a politics, entirely without me. Her great contribution is to show that this is not an accident or a misfortune but the condition of the photograph in war: it survives by becoming available to everyone, which is to say by belonging to no one.The deepest current in the book is erasure, and what survives it. The Sri Lankan state did not merely win the war; it set about unremembering it. Cemeteries were bulldozed, bodies incinerated, the landscape paved and built over with monuments to the victors. Against this machinery of forgetting, Buthpitiya finds the photograph doing its stubborn work – the memorial portrait that refuses the official silence, the atrocity image stitched into a commemoration banner, the identity card resurrected as protest.At the centre of the book is a cry she records at a remembrance gathering, a mother clawing at the earth: the truth is in the soil. It is the line that gives one of her chapters its title, and it names the book’s faith – that what the state buries does not decay, that it waits, that it can be exhaled again. Anyone who has followed the exhumations at Chemmani, where the ground keeps surrendering its dead, knows this is not metaphor. The bones rise where silence once held. The photograph, in Buthpitiya’s telling, is another such seam in the soil: a buried truth that refuses to finish dying.And here is where the book opened a door I want to walk through carefully, because it leads across the water. Buthpitiya’s erasure is Colombo’s – the Sinhalese state expunging the visual memory of the people it defeated. But erasure was never Colombo’s monopoly. India, too, has its reasons to forget this war. The intervention – the peacekeeping force that arrived to enforce a peace and stayed to fight the very fighters it had once sheltered – is the subcontinent’s quietly abandoned chapter, a misadventure that does not flatter the national story and has been allowed, accordingly, to fade. And here the book hands me, unknowingly, the other half of its own argument.The very portraits Buthpitiya watches travelling across Instagram are pictures whose negatives I no longer possess. The image is everywhere; the photographer’s archive is nowhere. Much of the work I carried out of those jungles simply vanished within a few years, and has never resurfaced. I offer this not as grievance but as corroboration. The book records the survival of the image; I can testify to the erasure of its maker’s hold on it – and the two are the same coin. Her thesis, that the image is something states and time reach for and rearrange, holds on both shores of the Palk Strait. She documents the Tamil half with rigour and tenderness. The Indian half is, for now, an absence – and the most generous thing I can say about A Volatile Picture is that it makes you feel the shape of what lies beyond its chosen frame.Also read: Seventy-Eight Years at Sea: Sri Lanka and the Costs of Unfinished FreedomIf I have a reservation, it is the obvious one for a book that began its life as a doctorate. The scholarly scaffolding – the theorists summoned, the vocabulary of citizenship and deterritorialization and the rest – is a wall the general reader must climb, and not everyone will. This is a pity, because beneath the apparatus is a profoundly humane book that the general reader of this paper would be moved by. Buthpitiya writes, as one of her reviewers notes, not only as a scholar but as someone the conflict has shaped; that intimacy is the book’s warmth, and it deserves to reach past the seminar room.My advice to the reader who is not an anthropologist is to push through the theory to the people: to Rajaratnam, the old studio man in Jaffna who named his shop Baby because a baby’s smile is the smile of God; to the retouching artist turning a state headshot into a garlanded saint; to Indran, the frame-maker in whose shop an uncollected memorial portrait sat propped among the printed gods.The portrait – an old woman in a pale pink sari, the pale blue behind her giving away the identity photograph it had been made from – Buthpitiya snapped where it stood and posted; within minutes a stranger wrote to say that is my ammamma in the middle – the picture having travelled, in a single afternoon, from a Jaffna shelf to a grandson who read in it proof that she had reached heaven.There is reason, finally, to be hopeful, and Buthpitiya earns it. Her book ends not in despair but in the conviction that the image resists the erasure aimed at it – that photographs continue to generate truths and solidarities that the state cannot finally suppress. I believe her, and I have the missing archive to prove the stakes. The truth she describes is the kind that develops slowly, in the dark, long after the shutter has fallen and the photographer has gone. Some of it is in the soil at Chemmani. Some of it is in a memorial frame in a Jaffna front room. Some of it, I have to assume, is in a box of negatives that disappeared and may yet, one day, be found. A Volatile Picture is a book about all the places a buried image waits. It is the best argument I have read for why we must keep looking for them.Shyam Tekwani is a former photojournalist who covered the Sri Lankan civil war. His eyewitness account and photographs are cited and discussed in the book under review. His recent essay The Afterlife of War’s Images appeared in New Lines Magazine.