{"id":11028,"date":"2026-07-20T01:06:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T20:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/?p=11028"},"modified":"2026-07-20T01:06:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T20:06:32","slug":"opinion-a-billion-eyes-one-shared-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/?p=11028","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | A Billion Eyes. One Shared Experience."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script>\r\n  atOptions = {\r\n    'key' : '644b717812d811d6a1c1fc5b6ccd6fa6',\r\n    'format' : 'iframe',\r\n    'height' : 90,\r\n    'width' : 728,\r\n    'params' : {}\r\n  };\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script src=\"https:\/\/www.highperformanceformat.com\/644b717812d811d6a1c1fc5b6ccd6fa6\/invoke.js\"><\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-0\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">I am not at the World Cup. I\u2019m going to play the odds here and say that neither are you. Despite the fact that this is apparently the biggest World Cup of all time \u2014 more countries represented, more matches played, more fans paying more money for tickets than ever before \u2014 almost none of us have been at the World Cup, at least not physically. Like almost everyone who\u2019s been watching (whether casually and fitfully, as in my case, since my country, Ireland, didn\u2019t even qualify for the competition, or with the steadfast commitment and maniacal fervor of so many millions of dedicated spectators), I have been watching it on television.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">The number of people who attend the World Cup, large and growing though it may be, is nothing compared with the sheer world-buckling biomass of those who experience it on a screen. According to FIFA\u2019s figures, some 1.5 billion people, nearly a fifth of the population of the planet, watched the last World Cup final, in 2022, and the tournament this year seems on track to exceed that number. So much attention is paid to the business of physically being at the World Cup \u2014 the teams that make it there, the fans who travel to support them, the wild and joyful spectacle of multifarious soccer-loving humanity converging on a given place at a given time \u2014 that it is easy to overlook the extent to which it is a televised spectacle, perhaps even primarily a televised spectacle.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">In this spirit, some of the most interesting images to emerge from this World Cup have been created by photographers who are not, in fact, at the World Cup. These photographers are not, that is, standing by the touchline recording the action with their telephoto lenses in the traditional manner, but rather sitting hundreds or even thousands of miles away capturing the flow of images on their television screens. In doing so, they\u2019ve made of those images something new and visually singular \u2014 whether it\u2019s by photographing the screen through a bag of water (as the Paris-based photographer Bilal Aouffen has done) or rendering the pixelated image of a player as a dreamy smear that seems to capture more a fleeting and indistinct impression of the goal than the goal itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-1\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">Take, for instance, the photographs posted to Instagram by the Brazilian artist Gabriel Rolim, whose images are wittily mediated: He uses a modified camera made for the Game Boy to take shots of his television, which he converts into animations that are strange, and strangely delightful, like a pixelated thermographic image of a memory of watching the World Cup. Or the Moroccan photographer Karim Ouakkaha\u2019s beautifully textured shot of the Egyptian goalkeeper Mostafa Shobeir, sitting crestfallen in defeat, the melancholy digital blear of the image making it seem as though he himself is dissolving along with his team\u2019s hopes of progressing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-2\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">Jared Soares, a Washington-based artist, snaps photographs of the matches playing on his television, prints them out in monochrome on printer paper and then crumples and flattens the paper before scanning it. The creases give a startling tactile form to his black and white images of players and, especially, fans in moments of public agony and ecstasy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-3\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">The oblique angle of approach used by all these artists comes with a history. In the 1960s, the American photographer Lee Friedlander made <a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/fraenkelgallery.com\/portfolios\/lee-friedlander-the-little-screens\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">a series<\/a> called \u201cThe Little Screens,\u201d which depicts hotel rooms with television screens displaying human faces like ghostly apparitions. In the 1970s, as television was becoming more and more luridly omnipresent, the Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert went further. His <a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/www.magnumphotos.com\/arts-culture\/art\/harry-gruyaert-tv-shots\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">series<\/a> \u201cTV Shots\u201d captured in close-up the distorted, cathodic flare of images on his television set in London. He photographed the televised coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics, live footage of Apollo flights and broadcasts of the British soap opera \u201cCoronation Street<em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">.\u201d <\/em>In its treatment of the screen itself as a photographic subject, \u201cTV Shots\u201d<em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\"> <\/em>amounted to a gesture of radical postmodernism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-4\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">Besides the fleeting moments of soccer that millions of viewers have been watching, these World Cup photos express something different.<strong class=\"F_p3NG_bold\"> <\/strong>In these images, TV screens are not an oppressive, degrading or insinuating presence; they are a means not of erasing or escaping the world but of reaching and being reached by it. Viewed on an Instagram feed on an iPhone, close-up images of television screens appear by comparison to be almost a countercultural utopian space. In a world where everyone experiences his own hyper-individualized flow of images and video and text, minutely optimized for maximum commercial extraction, the World Cup is a rare moment of shared attention.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">As the World Cup has gone on, I\u2019ve become increasingly enthusiastic about the competition. I\u2019ve been watching with my 13-year-old son, who out of nowhere seems to have developed an interest in, and surprisingly granular knowledge of, the tournament and its players. I\u2019ve been enjoying the games themselves, but what I\u2019ve been enjoying even more is the almost anachronistic pleasure of watching it on live TV. My 8-year-old daughter has, for her part, been finding it an absurd inconvenience. Why should she have to stop watching cartoons so we could watch a football match? Because it\u2019s happening now, and only now, and we need to watch it not on our phones or on our iPads but on the television, and together.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-5\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">Deep into the second half of last week\u2019s semifinal between England and Argentina, I texted my friend Rosa, who I knew was watching the match in her house in London. I needed to ask her if she agreed that <a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7442975\/2026\/07\/15\/thomas-tuchel-england-world-cup-argentina\/\" title=\"\">England\u2019s manager<\/a>, Thomas Tuchel, <a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Alain_de_Botton\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">looks weirdly<\/a> like the British pop philosopher Alain de Botton.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">She texted back to humor my frivolous observation with assent, and, about three seconds later, Argentina equalized, and the match fell to pieces for England. She texted me photos of her living room full of crestfallen friends, holding their heads in sorrow or staring at the television with grim and futile resolve.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-6\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-18blb2c e1me5xab0\">I felt terrible for them all, but I found the photos oddly cheering \u2014 not because I\u2019m Irish and retain a petty postcolonial desire to see England and <a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/legionmagazine.com\/and-all-who-sail-in-her\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">all who sail in her<\/a> brought low, but because they were all doing the same thing that my family and I were doing in Dublin, and that countless millions of others in countless other places were doing: watching the World Cup. For the nearly six weeks of the tournament, all of us, everywhere, have been watching exactly the same things at exactly the same time \u2014 the same angles, the same close-ups, the same agonized or ecstatic replays. We have, all of us, in our own various and yet weirdly identical ways, been at the World Cup.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-7\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-l5q3va erlrjdy0\">Mark O\u2019Connell lives in Dublin and is the author, most recently, of \u201cA Thread of Violence.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-l5q3va erlrjdy0\">Source photographs by Alexis Adrian, Karim Amr, Bilal Aouffen, Ethan Bailey, Casper De Coninck, Pedro Diniz, Mike Francesco Draghici, Hassanein Khazaal, Gabriel Monnet, Karim Ouakkaha, Nazeera Qazzah, Sam Rogers, Gabriel Rolim, Alexandre Sim\u00f5es and Jared Soares.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-l5q3va erlrjdy0\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">The Times is committed to publishing <\/em><a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/01\/31\/opinion\/letters\/letters-to-editor-new-york-times-women.html\" title=\"\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">a diversity of letters<\/em><\/a><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\"> to the editor. We\u2019d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some <\/em><a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/help.nytimes.com\/hc\/en-us\/articles\/115014925288-How-to-submit-a-letter-to-the-editor\" title=\"\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">tips<\/em><\/a><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">. And here\u2019s our email: <\/em><a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/07\/19\/opinion\/mailto:letters@nytimes.com\" title=\"\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">letters@nytimes.com<\/em><\/a><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">.<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"css-l5q3va erlrjdy0\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">Follow the New York Times Opinion section on <\/em><a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/nytopinion\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">Facebook<\/em><\/a><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">, <\/em><a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/nytopinion\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">Instagram<\/em><\/a><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">, <\/em><a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tiktok.com\/@nytopinion\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">TikTok<\/em><\/a><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">, <\/em><a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/nytopinion.nytimes.com\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">Bluesky<\/em><\/a>, <a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/www.whatsapp.com\/channel\/0029VaN8tdZ5vKAGNwXaED0M\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">WhatsApp<\/em><\/a><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\"> and <\/em><a class=\"css-povzk\" href=\"https:\/\/www.threads.net\/@nytopinion\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\"><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">Threads<\/em><\/a><em class=\"dOMtDq_italic\">.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/www.instagram.com\/embed.js\"><\/script><script async src=\"\/\/www.tiktok.com\/embed.js\"><\/script><br \/>\n<br \/><script async=\"async\" data-cfasync=\"false\" src=\"https:\/\/pl30214220.effectivecpmnetwork.com\/9ab3d4df8a7e1a6171e16ddbf732cc19\/invoke.js\"><\/script>\r\n<div id=\"container-9ab3d4df8a7e1a6171e16ddbf732cc19\"><\/div>\r\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am not at the World Cup. I\u2019m going to play the odds here and say that neither are you. Despite the fact that this is apparently the biggest World Cup of all time \u2014 more countries represented, more matches played, more fans paying more money for tickets than ever before \u2014 almost none of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11029,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/07\/19\/opinion\/19Oconnel-WC-Promo\/19Oconnel-WC-Promo-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-hub"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}