Creating Experimental World Cup Images Through Alternative Photographic Processes

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.

However, there is a simpler way to achieve a warping effect: using printed photographs and a digital flat-bed scanner (as seen in this gallery).

As absurd as it may look, scanning has heritage in sports photography. Mechanical slit-scanning dates back to at least the late 1930s when the Hollywood engineer, Lorenzo Del Riccio, created the “circular flow camera”. Del Riccio’s device was utilised by Del Mar Thoroughbred Club in the US where it was installed at the finishing post.

With film travelling through the camera at the pace of an average horse, any body-part that moved faster or slower was distorted. Crucially, however, the camera recorded one fundamental truth: who won the race.

Two decades later, the legendary Life magazine photographer George Silk used slit-scanning at the try-outs for the Olympics in 1960 to show the human body in flux. His images of shot-putters and sprinters gave an impressionistic view of athletics.

This World Cup has seen a rise in the number of photographers covering the tournament in unique ways. Florence Pernet made these captivating images simply by photographing her TV screen, and they went viral when they were shared by the France footballer Michael Olise. As Pernet put it: “I don’t have an accreditation, but I do have my TV and my own vision.”

Even the photographers who work for global photo agencies are increasingly tasked with doing something a little different, hence the use of cumbersome vintage cameras, infrared imaging and prismatic filters alongside expensive mirrorless cameras and telephoto lenses. Getty’s Shaun Botterill has recently been shooting in Mexico with the same film stock that he used when he was covering the World Cup there in 1986.

What I learned while experimenting with my flat-bed scanner is that certain types of images are better suited to certain types of motion. For Harry Kane’s goal celebration I used a jagged approach that owed nothing to planning and everything to serendipity. Later scans, such as the mirroring of Kylian Mbappé, were premeditated.

Some people might question the wisdom of distorting reality or chasing imperfections. After all, it was only a few decades ago that photographers dreamed of having cameras that could shoot 30 crisp frames per second using eye-controlled autofocus. Why spurn technological progress and journalistic integrity? Because photography has always been an artistic medium as well as a documentary tool. It’s malleable. It’s subjective. There are no rules.

And yes, I know the pictures I’ve adapted took immense skill and vision to craft – they were brilliant in their own right, that’s exactly why I chose them – but sometimes it’s nice to play around with photography and to view the World Cup differently, even when you’re 3,000 miles away from the action.