Reclaiming The Private Mind
On Image And Language in 2025
by Anastasia Pagonas
Photographing my father in my sister’s backyard. 2024. He is the last person I know who reads the (Greek) newspaper.
I saw a traumatizing video yesterday. Without explaining its content, you already understand. Humans on the internet in 2025 understand. Although I was in my safe bed with a safe family in a safe town, I felt scared, alone and threatened. My body didn’t know the difference between a real criminal and a digital one. Sweating and heart racing, I deleted the app. The fear stayed.
It’s been years since I swore off mainstream news. “I’ll stick to the thinkers,” I said, following individuals I trust to contextualize and present stories. When I listen to their podcasts I feel grounded, engaged, mentally buzzy, informed. I’m getting what I want from them: thoughts expressed in words. When I follow them on social media, I unconsciously hold my breath. My dentist asks me when I clench my jaw the most and I know the answer.
“Looking at” may be the biggest misnomer of our time. When I “look at” images and videos online, I am not observing, I am eating. I experience digestion alone — both damage and nutrition — hoping that what I've absorbed isn’t fatally poisonous while vaguely knowing some of it is. When I open an image-based app, I eat its contents blind, trusting an algorithmic hand to deliver my plate. We know the master it serves.
In 2015 I did an experiment for one year where I had no cell phone. It caused extreme discomfort and inconvenience for my family and friends. If they were running late, there was nowhere to text to revise our plan. We both had to keep our word. National and personal news reached me at an embarrassing rate. “Jenny had her baby six months ago!” I became alienated: commercial exchanges were awkward. Getting lost meant asking for directions, which was met with confusion. Did you lose your phone?
The biggest change was the vast private mental space that re-opened to me. While driving, there was nowhere else for my attention to rest than on my thoughts and perceptions. My mind floated to memories. I watched birds closely. Book titles spontaneously arose. I felt I could hear my imagination breathing in and out like a relaxing dog. No one could tap, knock or bang on the door of my mind at will.
This morning I rise with the sun and ask myself how to feel well in 2025 as a human, artist and family member. “When I grow up I want to be like Mommy,” my eight year old said yesterday. “What does it mean to be like Mommy?” I asked, knowing the answer would either be heart-warming or insulting. “Stressful,” my oldest replied. It may have been the saddest moment of my life.
I download calm breathing meditations because I don’t know how to do that on my own. “Write the ceiling,” I say to myself. A mantra I have counseled myself with for decades. It means: if I need containment, write a room with a ceiling and a comfy bed and a locked door beside a lake. If I need expansion, write a room with a ceiling then set it on fire. Dissolve it into raindrops. Paint it with invisible paint. It means: write your way to personal space.
Viewing Julie Scheurwegh’s Mere, a photo book that got me thinking about the interrelation of image and word this year.
When I ran an art gallery, it was my job to write the context for the photography, panting and sculpture we exhibited. The press releases, vinyl wall text and information placards framed our image-based world to give viewers a guided experience. I join writer David Campany in his observation that image and word have always gone together in the history of photography. Image and the testimony (and false testimony) about the image as inseparable. Decontextualized image may be the processed food of our time.
Image-saturation has reached its obvious cultural max. We’ve had enough. There’s a sensation of choking, drowning, inescapable overuse. Pumping gas, a screen alternates between news horrors and an influencer’s smoothie recipe for the holidays. In the “nursing room” at a my local airport, mothers are invited to breastfeed in a chair chained to a wall while staring at a huge poster warning against human trafficking. The photograph is a girl my daughters’ age being led away by a shadowy man. The zeitgeist groans. Controlled or numb are terrible options.
I first conceived of MEMORY CULT in 2016 when I purchased a new phone and rejoined digital civilization. “I want to create a humane product,” I said. Inhumane products are things to buy which destroy human nature and culture. I want to create buyable things which enrich the living experience of all involved. For a photography and image-based brand, that has meant the championing of words alongside of the visual.
In 2025, I encourage you to write your way toward an autonomous inward zone. Where you set the agenda. Where your unconscious can stretch and run. Our brains are Seeking Devices, ever-scanning for focus. This searching is inherently good: soul exercise. It’s incumbent upon us to curate the diet. Experience in context. Soul and body. Image and word. Write your way to the necessary beauty of the private mind.
