Bloomington-Normal photographer Jason Reblando's next book is partially an immigration story.
Reblando's parents immigrated from the Philippines. He was born and raised on Long Island. The son of two doctors, he had planned to pursue medicine, getting on the waitlist at Loyola Medical School.
“That desire to go to medical school was always in me,” Reblando said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “I did fine, but not fine enough.”
Reblando studied sociology and took most of his prerequisite science courses later, through City Colleges of Chicago. When he didn’t get into medical school, he was 29, “not a spring chicken by medical school standards,” he said.
So, he abandoned the idea and picked up his camera full-time.
“At that point, I just wanted to try something else,” he said. “I was tired of the whole rigmarole.”
Reblando got an MFA in photography at Columbia College Chicago. He’s taught at Illinois Wesleyan and is now on the tenure track at Illinois State. For two decades, Reblando’s work outside the university has been anchored by trips to the Philippines.
His forthcoming book, This is Captured Paper, isn’t about Reblando, exactly, but extends from his personal experiences as a second-generation immigrant whose family is from a country his current one once occupied.
The book, a collection of colleges combining archival artifacts and Reblando’s own photographs, tackles the complex entanglement between the United States and the Philippines, bringing to light big, existential, American topics: Manifest Destiny, colonists becoming colonizers, and who gets to write and define a people and a culture.
This is Captured Paper is also a tariff story. It's behind schedule, hopefully out later this fall. Maybe winter. The book is printed on Manilla paper. The ink is from Japan.
“Things were held up over the summer,” Reblando said. “We’re just trying to make things go, eventually.”
Remnants of colonization
Like most Americans, Reblando only knew of the United States’ occupation in the Philippines “because of the 15 minutes we spent on it in the Spanish American War in high school.”
“It is a thing,” he said. The era known as the “American colonial period” lasted nearly 50 years, from 1898-1946.
“When I travelled in the Philippines, there’s lots of markers and remnants of that colonization,” Reblando said.
There were little things, like a street named after President William Howard Taft. And big ones.
“Manila and Baguio City were planned by Daniel Burnham, who was an urban planner in Chicago,” said Reblando. “So, there’s a big footprint of the U.S. in the Philippines.”
Reblando said U.S. occupation of the Philippines was an extension of westward expansion.
"Why should it stop at California?" he said. "Why should an ocean stop us? We'll just keep going until someone says stop. If there are resources out there, someone's going to get it. That's a sad reality. But it doesn't always have to be a land grab."
Reclaiming history
In 1901, a zoologist from the University of Michigan, Dean Worchester, was appointed Secretary of the Interior and Local Government of the Philippines. He photographed the country and its people as a scientist studying specimens, with many of his images published widely, including in the pages of National Geographic.
For Americans, Worchester's images were their first and only impression of the Philippines and its people.
“I can paint Dean Worchester as some villain, but I also see myself in him—as a photographer, as someone who is curious about the world. I don’t want to give him a pass, but I enjoy learning things.”
Still, Reblando said that even in 1898, there were influential voices pushing an anti-imperial message and seeking to avoid the exploitation and objectification of an entire race of people.
“I think it could have been different,” he said. “It’s not like empathy was invented in 2025. There are some really problematic images no matter what era you’re looking at. There are things that will make your skin crawl. To be doing this under the guise of science and the government—it is despicable.”
It’s not been easy work for Reblando, parsing through that archive and laying other artifacts and images to restore dignity to Worchester’s subjects.
“I’m trying to disrupt this colonial gaze, whether it be cut patterns or shielding of them—just covering them up and trying to confuse the viewer and reclaim that photographic narrative,” he said. “I’m not necessarily saying I’m rewriting history, but I think there is a way to engage with these images rather than just accepting them for fact.”
