The Guardian's picture editor Jonny Weeks has published a gallery of deliberately distorted images from the 2026 World Cup, created by adapting other photographers' work with a domestic digital flat-bed scanner. The piece highlights a growing trend during the tournament for "alternative photography" — experimental, imperfect images that offer a different way of viewing the competition, made even by those who are not present at the matches.

Weeks explains that the warping effect echoes traditional slit-scanning, an analogue technique that records the flow of time and dates back to a 1930s "circular flow camera" used at a US horse-racing finishing post, and was later employed by Life photographer George Silk at the 1960 Olympic try-outs. He notes other examples from this World Cup, including Florence Pernet, who went viral photographing her television screen, and agency photographers using vintage cameras, infrared and prismatic filters. He defends distorting reality on the grounds that photography has always been an artistic as well as a documentary medium.