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Artist Joseph Ernst reimagines global newspapers without any news

"In the post-Brexit, post-Trump world… everything is screaming for our attention, everything is competing for our time," says artist Joseph Ernst. And there are only so many hours in the day – eventually, we need to switch off."

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Stack of The New York Times newspapers with all images and text removed, showing only blank grey and white boxes where content would appear

Some switch off by simply watching telly, or reading a book, or even actively socialising IRL with friends and family. Ernst, on the other hand, took the more drastic measure of reimagining the world’s most famous newspapers as totally devoid of words and images for his Nothing in the News series. In their place, we just find beg and grey boxes, the shadowy promises of information that simply isn’t there.

The project is a physical manifestation of Ernst’s previous series Nothing on the Internet, which is – as you might expect – a series of “websites with nothing in them.” That series was born of a realisation that surely all of us can identify with: "Like most of humanity these days, I spend a lot of time online, but I was finding that increasingly, I’d log on to something like eBay or Instagram or Facebook and hours would pass without me noticing," says Ernst.

"In our quest to fill our lives with meaning and knowledge, we try to quickly take in as much as possible, skim read everything, picking up top-line information, and headline breaking news issues, whilst trying to avoid reading the ads, and keeping up with our Facebook and Instagram feeds at the same time. And what happens is that in the midst of this information overload, we become numb, we switch off, we stop caring."

Correio da Manhã newspaper reimagined without text or images, showing only red and grey placeholder boxes and a yellow stripe on white background
Two open newspaper spreads from Joseph Ernst's Nothing in the News series, showing empty grey and beige boxes where text and images would normally appear
Die Zeit newspaper reimagined without any news or images, showing only empty grey boxes where content would normally appear
Le Monde newspaper front page reimagined without text or images, showing only grey and blue placeholder boxes where content would appear
A copy of El País newspaper with its masthead visible but all content replaced with blank grey and beige boxes
Newspaper front page with Cyrillic text and red accent lines, stripped of all news content and imagery to show only empty grey boxes
NRC Handelsblad newspaper redesigned without text or images, showing only grey and beige placeholder boxes
A transparent plastic sheet printed with The Sun masthead at the top, with empty beige and grey boxes where news content would normally appear
The New York Times newspaper front page reimagined with all text and images removed, leaving only grey placeholder boxes where content would normally appear
A white newspaper front page titled "Corriere della Sera" with all text and images replaced by empty grey rectangular boxes, part of Joseph Ernst's Nothing in the News series
Four folded newspaper pages with blank spaces where text and images would normally appear, from Joseph Ernst's Nothing in the News series
Joseph Ernst's Nothing in the News artwork showing a newspaper layout with blank grey boxes where text and images would normally appear
Open newspaper spread from Nothing in the News series showing blank pages with empty grey and beige rectangular boxes where text and images would normally appear
The Times newspaper front page with all content removed, showing only the masthead and a turquoise banner where headlines would be, with grey placeholder boxes below
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