A Volatile Picture: War and the Political Work of Photography in Sri Lanka (Global South Asia) - Softcover

Buthpitiya, Vindhya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0295754443 ISBN 13: 9780295754444

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2026

Synopsis

Photography as witness and weapon amid civil war This groundbreaking ethnography explores how, in the context of Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war and its turbulent aftermath, photography has become bound to the Tamil political imagination. From state-commissioned images meant to surveil and rebel documentation of armed resistance, to the fragile memorials created from identity photographs of the disappeared, A Volatile Picture traces the making and moving of images across borders, communities, and generations. Studio portraits, passport pictures, family albums, atrocity photography, social media posts, and more act not only as records of loss and horror but also as vital tools for protest, solidarity, and the realization of alternate political futures. Drawing on transnational archival and ethnographic encounters and long-term fieldwork in northern Sri Lanka, Vindhya Buthpitiya situates photography as both a volatile medium and a political practice. Photographs emerge here as incendiary agents—simultaneously evidencing and triggering violence, sustaining memory, and inciting new visions of liberation. This is the first in-depth study of Tamil photographic practices in Sri Lanka, offering a major contribution to the anthropology of war, visual culture, and South Asian studies. Richly researched and deeply humane, A Volatile Picture demonstrates how, amid devastation and displacement, photographs continue to generate truths, solidarities, and hopes that resist erasure.

About this title

About the Authors

Vindhya Buthpitiya is lecturer of social anthropology at University of St Andrews, Scotland. She is co-editor of Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination (Duke, 2023).

Padma Kaimal is Batza Professor of Art and Art History at Colgate University. She is the author of Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis (Association for Asian Studies, 2013) and Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space (Washington, 2021).

Kalyanakrishnan "Shivi" Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asia Studies, professor of anthropology, professor of forestry and environmental studies, and codirector of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University.

Anand A. Yang is professor of international studies and history at the University of Washington. He is coeditor of Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History (Hawai'i, 2005), coeditor of Thirteen Months in China: A Subaltern Indian and the Colonial World (Oxford, 2017), and author of Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (California, 2021).

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295754443
• ISBN 13: 9780295754444
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256