On May 11th 2025 Meta decided to close the account for this project due to repeated violations of the terms of service. 

A post-mortem is in order

The Cult of the Eye (Cult van het Oog), better known by its handle @oogcult on Instagram, started out in early 2020 as a daily exercise of capturing film stills and collecting them. Discovering the suggestive power of an image separated from its narrative context, the exercise turned into somewhat of a mirror, in which I could see whatever turmoils were raging inside me at the moment. Over almost five years, slowly but surely the project grew and blossomed into a mosaic of all kinds of beauty. The human and perverted, the tragic and comedic, the poetic and surreal. The collection became a source of visual stimuli not only for myself but many like-minded creatives all over the world. Eventually the project garnered almost 7000 followers. 

The Cult of the Eye welcomed all. The too old, the too young, the too sad and the all-alone. There was only one requirement for cultists: to have more eyes than mouths.

The very first image I shared was that of a pensive Jack Nicholson and Lois Smith in the film Five Easy Pieces (1970) leaning pensively against the branches of an old tree. The image of silence between two siblings. The very last image shared in May 2025 was that of a seductive Nastassja Kinski in In Una Notte di Chiaro di Luna (1989) leaning between the two eyes of a gigantic wall print of Rutger Hauer. This image, hung in the baby room opposite the cradle, was meant to imprint the face of Hauer on the little baby to make up for the father’s absence. Now that Meta has decided to terminate the Oogcult account housing the archive of thousands of images, thereby metaphorically ripping off the imprinting material of our bedroom walls, I can only hope the imprinting was succesful, and the spirit of the cult lives on through the inspiration it will bring to those who were closely following the project.