I find your comments absolutely fascinating because it’s such a great example of how people can, whether they knew why or not, spot something odd visually. You don’t need to be a professional to know that these are not good photos. Portraits aside, those are fine I guess.

The reason it looks so weird to you is because they’re heavily cropped. They aren’t zoomed in via the lens, they just did heavy cropping for (seemingly) no reason. Zooming in to a subject on the lens and cropping in post produce radically different results.

The reality is they probably did not want to get releases for everybody in the photos, so they just told somebody “crop them out” and that was what we got. Not a guarantee, but if I had to take a guess, that would be my first one.

Another consequence is you see a lot of buildings, but no ground, so you have no sense of where or what size they are.