Allie Tsubota

Dead Letter Room is a photographic and textual dialogue with images that emerge from the end of the Asia-Pacific Wars and World War II in the Pacific. These images are governed by the historical contexts that produce them; they are mediated by the explosive aftershocks of nuclear war, the transoceanic space of imperial desire, and the onset of oblivion in the aftermath of catastrophe. Significant to this project are photographic and filmic materials from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), conducted in 1945 by the US military to study the efficacy of Allied-bombing on Japanese soil. Through sojourns in this archive, alongside my own image-making practice, I consider the temporal and spatial structures that condition photographic looking, the mediation of the visible and the visual in modern and contemporary warfare, the inter- and intrasubjective flows of desire in the postwar landscape, and the registers of withdrawal in the aftermath of disaster.

At the center of Dead Letter Room are a series of epistolary texts, written between myself and Hara Tamiki, the late Japanese poet known for his scantily published postwar prose. This fabulative correspondence spans Hara's and my day-to-day activities, dreams, desires, and encounters with images and with war. Like my visual dialogues with historical photographs, these texts draw the edges of the past and present closer together; they strive to build intimacy between temporally and spatially distant subjects.

At its core, Dead Letter Room contends with the photographic image as a site of psychic, social, and civil possibility; it is motivated by the photograph as that which fundamentally destabilizes the governance of time and the containment of history. Guided by Hara's prose–alongside key image-theoretical and art-critical texts like Ariella Azoulay's The Civil Contract of Photography and Jalal Toufic's The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster–Dead Letter Room questions what contemporary spectators owe to subjects of the past; and in turn, what the past owes to us.