Julie Weber: re | process

Julie Weber worked in a one-hour photo processing lab at a time when photography was experiencing a monumental shift from film to digital processes. Dye-sublimination printers, which use heat to transfer dye to paper, require a printer ribbon: a spool of thin polyester coated in repeating blocks of cyan, magenta and yellow dyes. Each image sent to the printer leaves behind three impressions on the ribbon, one for each color. When a ribbon reaches its printing capacity, it is full of image remnants, analogous to negatives. Fascinated by this material, Weber collected the film-like ribbons from the images she processed as a record of her time on that printer. re | process is the result of revisiting, repurposing, and reimaging this archive of material byproduct through an oscillation of digital and analogue photographic modalities. Rather than focusing on clear depiction of the original images left on the ribbon, Weber uses the material to form new images that depict visual cues of their own making, referencing the very processes that created them. In some sense, the original images become at once relegated and celebrated as another characteristic of the material. Through methodical application of color, tone, shape, layering, and repetition, photographic material and process are pulled to the fore where they are inseparable from subject matter.