The Most Talked-About World Cup Photos Were Taken In Someone's Living Room

When Florence Pernet was denied accreditation to cover the 2026 World Cup, she photographed matches from her television instead. The images went viral. A footballer deleted his entire Instagram to make room for them.

Before the World Cup started, Michael Olise wiped his entire Instagram account clean. Every post is gone. Years of images, celebrations, match photographs all deleted. His 10 million followers immediately started speculating. Transfer move imminent. Unhappy at Bayern Munich. A statement about something. The usual football internet logic running at full speed.

The actual reason was quieter and more interesting than any of that.

Olise has a personal photographer, Florence Pernet, a Paris-based sports photographer who had been documenting his career in her own particular style more personal, more artistic, less corporate than the standard agency photography that fills most footballers' feeds. He only posted her work. Then FIFA denied her accreditation for the World Cup in the United States.

Rather than switch to the thousands of high-resolution images that the tournament produces every day, Olise chose a different path. He cleared his account and started posting the photographs Pernet was taking from home pictures she shot by pointing her camera directly at her television screen.

The images looked unlike anything else circulating from the tournament. Grainy. Slightly distorted. The television scan lines visible in some of them. Motion blur. Colour that felt slightly off, slightly more saturated than reality. They looked, in the most precise way possible, like football seen through a screen rather than through a lens.

Which is exactly what they were

Pernet's technique is specific. By carefully controlling her shutter speed, she froze the broadcast's physical scan lines while allowing motion blur to accumulate. The pixels of the television display became part of the image. The flicker that most photographers would treat as interference became the point. The result has been described as nostalgic, cinematic, impressionistic somewhere between a documentary photograph and a painting of one.

As Pernet put it herself: "I don't have an accreditation, but I do have my TV and my own vision."

That sentence is the whole story in seventeen words.

What Pernet's accreditation denial actually means, technically, is worth explaining. FIFA's media accreditation system officially recognises journalists and photographers as authorised reporters for the tournament, granting them stadium access, press areas, and working positions close to the action. The process is competitive and restricted. Thousands of applications are submitted. Many are rejected. For freelance and independent photographers those without the institutional backing of a major agency, newspaper, or broadcast network the system presents a high barrier. The costs of covering a World Cup, the competition for the limited number of available passes, and the logistical requirements can make accreditation practically inaccessible to a large number of working photographers, regardless of their skill or the quality of their work.

Pernet hit that barrier. She did not accept its conclusions.

Her approach has historical precedent, though almost nobody citing her work this summer has mentioned it.

In 1972, a Belgian photographer named Harry Gruyaert was living in London when his television broke down while he was watching the Munich Olympics. The screen malfunctioned in ways that produced distorted, flickering images. Gruyaert pointed his camera at the dying screen and photographed what he saw, not the event itself, but the mediated version of it.

The images he produced, showing the Munich tragedy through the degraded filter of a failing television, became one of the most significant bodies of experimental photography of that decade. He later said: "Had I had more technical means at the time, the pictures would not have been so fresh."

Half a century later, Pernet arrived at the same logic through different circumstances. The screen is not an obstacle. It is a collaborator.

Pernet was not the only photographer at this World Cup who could not get where they needed to be.

Sidy Talla, the personal photographer travelling with the Senegal national team, was denied a Canadian visa ahead of Senegal's final group match in Canada. He had covered all of the team's previous games. For the final fixture, he sat in a hotel room in the United States, set his camera up in front of the television, and photographed the match from there. His images from that session with the same lo-fi, screen-capture aesthetic circulated widely after Senegal's elimination.

Two photographers. Two different countries. Two visa or accreditation barriers. The same response: the screen, the camera, the specific shutter speed, the decision to keep working.

The reaction to Pernet's images has not been entirely positive, and it is worth including the dissent. Some photographers have argued that pointing a camera at a television screen is not the same as creating original work that you are photographing someone else's broadcast rather than the event itself. Others have pointed out that the technique has been used at previous sporting events, including the Super Bowl, and is not new. Critics on social media suggested the acclaim was disproportionate to the innovation involved.

These are legitimate arguments. The photographs are not technically difficult to produce. They do not require specialist equipment or rare access. They require a specific decision about what to show and how, which is what all photography requires. Whether that constitutes art is a question that photography has never definitively resolved, and this particular debate will not resolve it either.

What is harder to dispute is the effect. The Portuguese national team reposted one of Pernet's images of Cristiano Ronaldo. Millions of people encountered her name for the first time because a footballer chose her work over everything else available. The images travelled in ways that perfectly sharp 4K agency photographs, however technically accomplished, had not.

At the same time as Pernet was working from her living room, other photographers were bringing experimental techniques inside the stadiums. Getty's Shaun Botterill was shooting in Mexico on the same film stock he used when covering the World Cup there in 1986. Others were shooting with vintage cameras, infrared imaging and prismatic filters. The Guardian documented a rise in slit-scanning, an analogue technique dating back to 1930s Hollywood in which film is wound past a narrow aperture to record the distortion of time itself.

The pattern across all of them is the same: a conscious refusal to simply produce another sharp image of a well-lit footballer.

At a tournament where hundreds of accredited photographers with high-end equipment produce tens of thousands of images per match, the competitive question is no longer whether you can take a technically perfect photograph. It is whether you can take one that makes someone stop.

Olise's account, filled with Pernet's television-screen images, does something that most footballers' social media does not. It shows the match the way the person watching at home actually experiences it through a screen, at a remove, mediated by broadcast technology and the distance between the event and the viewer.

For 99.9 percent of the people watching this World Cup, that television screen is the only access they have. Pernet made images from inside that experience, rather than from inside the stadium.

Sometimes the most honest picture of a thing is taken by the person who wasn't there.

I don't have an accreditation, but I do have my TV and my own vision." Florence Pernet

DID YOU KNOW? The technique of photographing a television screen to create artistic images of sporting events dates back to 1972, when Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert pointed his camera at a malfunctioning television during the Munich Olympics. The distorted, flickering images he produced became one of the most significant bodies of experimental photography of that decade and directly anticipated the aesthetic that Florence Pernet has developed at the 2026 World Cup more than fifty years later.