The Newspaper is a photobook produced using the newspaper itself as its medium. The project is set within the Kyoto Shimbun, one of Japan’s oldest regional newspapers with a history spanning more than 140 years. Even today, reporters continue travelling to remote mountain villages, while newspaper carriers deliver the news every day. Japanese photographer Kazuma Obara and writer Akihico Mori documented, through photographs and texts, one of the final landscapes left behind by the newspaper industry.

This photobook reflects on the limits of human capability. Technology scales exponentially, but the human body does not. While today’s algorithmically commodified news economy is sustained by electricity, networks, and limitless replication, the physical newspaper was sustained by human labour. For much of the twentieth century, information in newspapers effectively did not exist unless it was physically delivered. Printed late at night and transported by human hands, newspapers circulated only within the territory that could be reached by morning delivery. Yet those physical limitations were also what made it possible to preserve small local memories.

This book critically reimagines the newspaper as perhaps one of the limits of information that humans could genuinely take responsibility for moving, holding, and sustaining.

The work consists of thirteen separate newspapers printed on a rotary press and archived together with metal bindings, functioning collectively as a single archival photobook. At the same time, each section can also be detached and read individually as an independent newspaper. The structure of the work continuously moves between two states: photobook and newspaper, archive and circulation.