Why Was Everyone Taking Pictures of Their TVs During the World Cup?

As anyone living in New York (or lesser state New Jersey) will tell you, the 2026 FIFA World Cup was chaos. Yet, for all the tourist mobs and cheers (and jeers) that rang out night after night, it was also remarkably buttoned-up. The world's most famous football heroes performed at the highest level (despite the occasional top-down shakeup). Unaffiliated brands were obscured. Quite literally millions of fans filtered through hosting stadiums with relatively little incident. The World Cup was a well-oiled machine.

Which is why the best view of the World Cup was also the least polished. Nothing beats the POV of people who weren't actually there.

A few canny folks made the view from their couch look quite cool, ticket prices be damned. Actually, the end result was so cool that it's become one of the defining looks of the World Cup's climactic finale.

Photographer Florence Pernet is widely credited as being the first to make screengrabs of the World Cup television broadcast look good. (Pernet, who began uploading her photos to Instagram after being denied accreditation, cited photographer Matthew Johnson's "Screen Time" series as an inspiration.)

Pernet was later tapped to provide imagery for the official Portugal national football team Instagram page while other artists, including Lukas Korschan and Hannah Coen, shared their own stylized shots of the World Cup as seen on their TVs.

Over the next few weeks, the technique spread. The English team joined in. High-profile French winger and Highsnobiety cover star Michael Olise cleared his feed to make room for blurry broadcast pictures. LOEWE, official partner to the World Cup-winning Spanish team, celebrated victory with, yes, photos from the TV.

Blame the establishment. These images reframe and freeze moments witnessed by us all — that is, the "us" who didn't attend the games because of price or effort. It's symbolic of the shared experience that is sport and the shared experience of being unable to see sport in-person.

It's also an artistic elevation of the ordinary. World Cup TV imagery breaks the barrier between subject and image-capturer. It betrays the distance separating them while centralizing their removed vantage point. It's the universal individual experience, pedestaled. As polished (and exclusionary) as the World Cup was, these photos succeed by being unvarnished (and inclusive).

A similar vibe is attained by likeminded photos of runway-show livestreams, wherein ordinary folks likely to be overlooked by luxury houses make the presentations their own.

You are the art director! You are the photographer! You decide upon the framing, the crop, the close-up. You put your own stamp on a premium product put forth by the powers that be, whether it's Louis Vuitton or FIFA. For once, you're in control.

Everyone loves a good leveling of the playing field.

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