Dear Mili is concerned with invasions and exorcisms, both physical and psychological, by ideology, decay, disease, and other external forces. The pervasive desire for personal purification and self optimization gives rise to questions around authenticity of desire. This project is an investigation of the contradictory notion that the ‘self’ can be a site of both pleasure and loss, and of how the act and mechanisms of photography conceptually mirrors this contradiction. The events of both photographing and being photographed are act of negation and attestation of a slippery, refractory reality.