In CULT, Maya Mercer is moving into a frame of mind wherein an anxious, even delirious magic realism infuses both subject matter and the regarding eye. The hardscrabble innocents Mercer has been documenting and celebrating, the adolescent misfits born and doomed to a nearly feral existence cast here as devotees of some other powerful and seemingly panoptic force — a cult leader, unseen in the photographs, who keeps these girls/metaphors prisoner without locking a door and exploits them as much through neglect as through command.

Indeed, the absence of this cult figure suggests that he (or she to they) may be a figment of the girl’s imagination, a fantasy deity or absentee high priest who abuses his flock with indifference. They provide the passion. They provide the devotion. Their vivid if squalid metamorphoses are, from all we can tell, self-induced.

CULT is not only about the social phenomenon of cultism so much as it is about the psychological state of irrational and ultimately self-sacrificing belief, the mindset that engenders and sustains cults including our so called society system.

The little "society" these cultic girls weave for themselves only reinforces their fear-driven dependence on, and surrender of all autonomy to a "higher power", even as that power lies entirely offstage, out of our sight and apparently out of theirs as well. This is one of those horror stories where the true horror lies not at the door, but well within the dwelling, indeed, deep within its victims. And we might count among those victims: there, but for the grace of a far kinder god, go we?

— Peter FRANK, Los-Angeles.