Warping the World Cup: the rise of homespun ‘photographs’

Using a digital flat-bed scanner, our picture editor Jonny Weeks adapts some of his favourite images from the tournament and explores the trend of alternative photography

Although I’ve edited thousands of football photographs over the years, I’ve never attended a World Cup match. I envy those who get to be pitchside with their cameras for such big events. Yet, as I’ve discovered during this tournament, you don’t have to be there to create experimental images of the tournament.

Slit-scanning is an alternative photographic process that I first tried many years ago. Using a narrow slit inside an analogue camera, the photographer winds a roll of film past the aperture to record the flow of time. It’s a tricky and laborious technique which produces curiously distorted results – almost like celebrating the problem of “rolling shutter”, which has vexed photographers for generations.

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