Writing + PhotoWriting
Books
A Volatile Picture: War and the Political Work of Photography in Sri Lanka (University of Washington Press, 2026)
Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination (Co-editor as part of the Photodemos Collective, Duke University Press, 2023)
Essays + Photography
How does the land endure in its grief? How does the ocean mourn? FLIP: London Independent Photography (August 2025)
Studio east: everyday photography and the militarisation of leisure in Trincomalee, Eidolon Journal for Everyday Photography (September 2025)
Fables of Recovery and Revolution, Urban Violence Research Network (November, 2024)
How to Capture Birds of Freedom: Picturing Tamil Women at War, Trans Asia Photography (May, 2023)
“The truth is in the soil”: the political work of photography in Northern Sri Lanka, Citizens of Photography (Duke University Press, 2023)
Naveena Camera, Dastavezi (October 2022)
‘The heavy footed state, which made a mess’ Urban Violence Research Network (August, 2022)
Elsewheres and otherworlds in the wake of war, Language is Migrant (January, 2022)
Picture Palaces, PhotoDemos Photobook Series (2022)
Future Photographs, PhotoDemos Photobook Series (2022)
Absence in technicolour: protesting enforced disappearances in northern Sri Lanka, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (May, 2022)
In Sri Lanka, A Perpetrator State Demands Non-Violence, Urban Violence Research Network (May, 2022)
All That Remains: Postwar Materialities in Northern Sri Lanka, Ethnographic Marginalia (January, 2021)
Photodemos: Citizens of Photography: the Camera and the Political Imagination, Ten Years of the Trans Asia Photography Review / Notes from the Field (Spring, 2020)
Unruly Rememberings, Invisible Histories, Joint Center for History of Economics at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge (August, 2019)
Of Remberings/Forgettings in Northern Sri Lanka, Invisible Histories, Joint Center for History of Economics at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge (August, 2019)
‘Paradise’ in Missing Pictures: A Brief and Incomplete History of Sri Lankan Photography, History Workshop Online (July, 2019).
Reconciling Rights, Responsibilities and Disjunctures: An Assessment of Sri Lanka’s Post-War Development Drive, Law and Society Trust, Colombo, Sri Lanka (2013)
Film
Pala [Writer, 89 minutes / Colour / 2023 | Language: Sinhala | Subtitles: English]
Scratches on Celluloid (with Timothy P.A. Cooper) [53 minutes/Colour/2018 | Language: Panjabi, Tamil, Urdu | Subtitles: English]
The images shown are re-photographed studio negatives from Jaffna from the 1970s-1980s (c) Vindhya Buthpitiya.
Smoke, Shadow, Light 