Twin City photographer confronts colonial imagery with humanity and empathy

Bloomington-Normal photographer Jason Reblando’s subsequent guide is partially an immigration story.

Reblando’s mother and father immigrated from the Philippines. He was born and raised on Long Island. The son of two docs, he had deliberate to pursue drugs, getting on the waitlist at Loyola Medical School.

“That desire to go to medical school was always in me,” Reblando mentioned 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 programs later, via City Colleges of Chicago. When he didn’t get into medical faculty, he was 29, “not a spring chicken by medical school standards,” he mentioned.

So, he deserted the thought and picked up his digital camera full-time.

“At that point, I just wanted to try something else,” he mentioned. “I was tired of the whole rigmarole.”

Reblando acquired an MFA in images at Columbia College Chicago. He’s taught at Illinois Wesleyan and is now on the tenure observe at Illinois State. For twenty years, Reblando’s work exterior the college has been anchored by journeys to the Philippines.

His forthcoming guide, This is Captured Paper, isn’t about Reblando, precisely, however extends from his private experiences as a second-generation immigrant whose household is from a rustic his present one as soon as occupied.

The guide, a group of faculties combining archival artifacts and Reblando’s personal images, tackles the complicated entanglement between the United States and the Philippines, bringing to gentle huge, existential, American matters: Manifest Destiny, colonists turning into colonizers, and who will get to put in writing and outline a folks and a tradition.

This is Captured Paper can be a tariff story. It’s not on time, hopefully out later this fall. Maybe winter. The guide is printed on Manilla paper. The ink is from Japan.

“Things were held up over the summer,” Reblando mentioned. “We’re just trying to make things go, eventually.”

Remnants of colonization

Like most Americans, Reblando solely knew of the United States’ occupation within the Philippines “because of the 15 minutes we spent on it in the Spanish American War in high school.”

“It is a thing,” he mentioned. The period often called the “American colonial period” lasted practically 50 years, from 1898-1946.

“When I travelled in the Philippines, there’s lots of markers and remnants of that colonization,” Reblando mentioned.

There have been little issues, like a avenue named after President William Howard Taft. And huge ones.

“Manila and Baguio City were planned by Daniel Burnham, who was an urban planner in Chicago,” mentioned Reblando. “So, there’s a big footprint of the U.S. in the Philippines.”

Reblando mentioned U.S. occupation of the Philippines was an extension of westward enlargement.

“Why should it stop at California?” he mentioned. “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 historical past

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 nation and its folks as a scientist learning specimens, with lots of his pictures revealed extensively, together with within the pages of National Geographic.

For Americans, Worchester’s pictures have been their first and solely impression of the Philippines and its folks.

“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 mentioned that even in 1898, there have been influential voices pushing an anti-imperial message and looking for to keep away from the exploitation and objectification of a complete race of individuals.

“I think it could have been different,” he mentioned. “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 simple work for Reblando, parsing via that archive and laying different artifacts and pictures to revive dignity to Worchester’s topics.

“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 mentioned. “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.”