Ryan Frigillana – PATMOS – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Gerhard Clausing •

When you first hold this large loose-leaf book project in your hands, the sheer impact of its size and its images is overwhelming. We get that same feeling when we are overwhelmed by incessant appeals on all our “entertainment” media which are our constant companions – on phones, television, etc. We use those media, and they in turn use us. Ryan Frigillana’s PATMOS is an electrifying visual meditation on the impact our media have on us, especially as they serve both religious and political belief systems. Taking its name from the island where the Apostle John received his visions of the time of reckoning, Frigillana’s book reinterprets the idea of prophetic sight for an age defined by screens and disinformation. As is the case with all media, we may ponder these images for any length of time, and we can also rearrange the sequence and the resulting juxtapositions, since the volume is not bound, but is in loose-leaf tabloid form.

Across some forty double-page spreads, television stills from the tumultuous U.S. presidential election cycles of 2020 and 2024 are woven together with biblical illustrations of the Apocalypse. The resulting impressions are both chaotic and mesmerizing: LED pixels bleed into halftone patterns, biblical horsemen gallop through broadcast noise, and fragments of divine imagery are fused with bits of pseudo-theatrical performances by various political figures. Through aggressive scanning, enlargement, and distortion, Frigillana transforms these familiar signals into artifacts of delirium and revelation, presenting them as seismic collisions. The depicted fervor, including some violence, is a mediated mirror of reality.

“Signals become distorted, truth and meaning are stretched and skewed.” — Ryan Frigillana

The physicality of PATMOS emphasizes the instability of the depicted content. The loose pages flutter and shift, echoing the instability of both media narratives and belief systems. The tactile grain of the paper underscores the collision between faith and fact, divinity and data. Each spread feels like a prophetic fragment unearthed from a huge digital desert. There is no verbal text in the entire book, only images upon images that demand your attention.

Frigillana’s work is deeply informed by his having come in from outside. Born in the Philippines and raised in Long Island, he approaches American political iconography with a special clairvoyance. This semi-distance also allows him to see the religious underpinnings of nationalism – the way belief systems migrate from church to screen and back. His reimagined PATMOS is not a sacred island but a digital exile, a psychological space where the collapse of truth forces a kind of rude awakening.

There is a haunting duality at play: the book seems to both condemn and mourn the spectacle it documents. The fevered mix of imagery evokes what Susan Sontag once called “the ecology of images” – a saturated environment in which every frame competes for moral authority. Yet within this noise, Frigillana extracts a strange beauty, a visual liturgy for a society that seems to mistake signal for salvation. When apocalypse becomes ordinary, can revelation still occur?

Ultimately, PATMOS represents both a warning and a prayer. In a world where apocalypse is a nightly broadcast, in a cathedral of spectacle, what revelations remain unseen? Frigillana’s answer is neither despair nor redemption, but clarity – a momentary recognition of the illusions confronting us. In its intensity and invention, PATMOS deserves a special place among the most urgent photobooks of recent years, a testament to the power of photography – not just to record, but to evoke and let you judge for yourself. PATMOS invites a reshuffling, a fresh interpretation, to rediscover fundamental meanings in all that digital noise.

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Gerhard (Gerry) Clausing, PBJ Editorial Consultant and Editor Emeritus, is an author and artist from Southern California and Franconia.

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Ryan Frigillana – PATMOS

Photographer: Ryan Frigillana (born in Iligan City, Philippines, lives in Long Island, New York)

Texts: As photographed

Language: English

Tabloid style, unbound; 80 unpaginated pages; 11.6 x 14.5 inches (29.5 x 37 cm); printed in the UK on recycled paper; first edition of 100; ISBN 979-8-218-77577-3

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