When Alex Hennessy and Mike Graziano decided to spend five years travelling to 195 countries, they knew it would be a trip worth sharing, which, these days, means: worth filming. A cameraphone would be easiest, an SLR the highest quality. But, for Hennessy and Graziano, there was one essential piece of kit: a GoPro.
Like Google or Xerox, “GoPro” is one of those branded proper nouns that has been so successful that it has become a verb. With 6,000 or more new tagged videos uploaded to YouTube each day, GoPro-ing is now a legitimate phenomenon. The cameras are sturdy, cheap and small enough to sit in the palm of your hand; they can be attached to almost anything, from a surfboard to a tripod to a recalcitrant labrador. They are easy to use and produce remarkably high-quality video, which you can post online right away. To Hennessy’s disappointment, though, that formula was not enough to gain the pair’s films any online traction.
One day, Hennessy and Graziano were cycling through a tough neighbourhood in Buenos Aires with some friends when a guy on a motorbike cut them off and pulled out a gun. In Spanish, he demanded Hennessy’s backpack. He was terrified. All he could think of to say was “amigo”. Then he dropped his bike and ran.
Hennessy’s GoPro was filming at the time. In the footage, you can hear his feet pounding the pavement. Eventually, he borrows a bike and rides away from trouble. After a few moments, when it’s clear the thwarted mugger isn’t going to reappear, Hennesy starts to laugh. “I’ve got that whole thing on my GoPro,” he tells his friends. “I was recording that whole thing.”
“I had completely forgotten the thing was on,” Hennesy says now. “I was out of harm’s way, no one got hurt, and I had an amazing shot.”
When Hennessy posted it, he knew he had something big. When he woke up the next morning, the video had been watched 600,000 times. And hits beget hits: today, just over a fortnight later, it has more than 7.3m. Finally, the trip had gone viral. And if that has been a boon for Hennesy and Graziano, it also provoked some complicated feelings. “It’s great that it’s brought us traffic,” Hennesy says. “I just wish the rest of my videos would get that many hits. I put 40 hours of editing into one seven-minute film. It’s a lot of effort.”
That’s how virality, and GoPros, function: no amount of editing can be as powerful as a glimpse of something out of the ordinary, and no camera is more likely to catch that glimpse than one that keeps rolling even when you’re being chased by a guy with a gun. Most of those 6,000 videos uploaded each day will disappear without trace, but a few will catch fire. A street biker pulling off a vertiginous pivot on top of a giant Rubik’s Cube. A squirrel mistaking a camera for a sex object. An egg being mesmerisingly poached. An eagle soaring over the French Alps. A french bulldog in mad pursuit of an especially attractive stick. A free runner loping to the top of a crane, then hanging by one hand over the impassive city below. A fireman saving a kitten. It turns out that the kitten later died, but the news has little impact on the hit count, which just keeps going up.
You may not have seen these videos, but you will probably have seen others like them, captured in GoPro’s distinctive visual language: a wide, fish-eyed lens that seems to bring the whole world swimming into focus; staggeringly sharp pictures for such a cheap device; and that persistent first-person perspective, the world spinning drunkenly around a fixed point, like Peep Show without the jokes. If this really rings no bells, it will soon. In June, founder and CEO Nick Woodman took his business public in New York. The initial public offering valued the company at $3bn (£1.7bn). It quickly rose to around $11.5bn (£7.1bn), 283% on that starting price, which makes Woodman a very rich man (though that price dropped sharply earlier this week when Woodman gave 5.8m shares to a charity run by him and his wife).
This week saw the launch of a new range of cameras. The Hero 4 Silver and Black are updated iterations of the brand’s bankable central idea, but the third addition, simply called the Hero – an entry-level model that will sell for under £100 – could be the one that pushes GoPros into serious ubiquity.
As an application of technology, the GoPro can seem miraculous. As a cultural phenomenon, though, it’s at least complicated. Katrina Sluis, a senior lecturer in digital media arts at London South Bank University and curator of digital programmes at the Photographers’ Gallery, has her reservations. “These new cameras are very aware of the idea of a creative consumer who needs to share their life and make it transparent,” she says. “There is something dystopian about sharing every moment, in super-high-res, on cameras that make it effortless. It’s exciting anyone can access that, but it raises the question: what’s left unphotographed?” She invokes Andy Warhol. “The idea we all want to be famous for 15 minutes – that’s not the problem. Increasingly, it’s a world where we all wish we could hide for 15 minutes.”
Sluis also refers to The Circle, Dave Eggers’ satire of Silicon Valley, in which a Jobsian tech guru, Bailey, presents an innovative camera called the SeeChange to his adoring followers. Later I find the passage she’s talking about. “He was holding a small device in his hand, the shape and size of a lollipop,” it reads. “We’re losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn,” Bailey says. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. Not with these cameras.” As he speaks, a mantra appears on screen behind him: “ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN.”
Well, we’re not quite there yet. For one thing, the underwhelming battery life and vast demands on disc space that the GoPro makes leaves it some way off being a functional dystopic weapon. And although the camera’s technical specifications are impressive, it is also severely limited in comparison to a traditional SLR. Still, there’s no doubting the GoPro’s growing power, which now extends beyond its gnarly roots. Doctors use them, and oceanographers, and school science classes. There is also, you may not be surprised to learn, quite a lot of porn.
Then there’s policing. GoPro do not, in fact, manufacture the body-worn video cameras (BWVs) that are becoming ever more common with the British cops, but it’s a sign of the brand’s dominance that they’re often called GoPros anyway. Dr Barak Ariel, fellow in experimental criminology at Cambridge University, has conducted extensive research on the subject, and in his view the evidence points to a clear conclusion: whether they calm the officers or the civilians or both, the cameras are a hugely powerful means of reducing trouble between the police and the public. “You’re giving up civil liberties, but you’re gaining transparency,” he argues. “The assumption now should be that things are being recorded on video, in high quality, all the time.”
In a sense, this is reassuring. It is also untethering. The most useful definition of moral behaviour, after all, is what you do when you think nobody is watching. If other people are always looking at you, how are you ever supposed to see yourself?
Ten days ago, GoPro invited a group of journalists and bloggers from across Europe to a preview event for their new cameras at a hotel in Shoreditch, east London. The group is excited. “Hardly anyone has any new ideas in photography these days,” one specialist confides. “Not Canon, not Nikon, not anyone. This is a big market and there’s still only one player.”
We start with some videos of GoPro-sponsored athletes. In one, Jason Paul, a goofily handsome German freerunner, skips to the top of a bridge in Frankfurt and tightrope-walks across a girder at the apex with the nerveless, still centre of someone three feet from the ground; looking through his eyes, as we seem to, I feel the need to cling to the table in front of me. “That,” a GoPro-er called Kevin says warmly, “was pretty rad!”
“Sometimes I just want to enjoy the moment – I don’t want the camera, I just want to be in it,” Paul says a few days later. “But the filming isn’t distracting for me … it’s such an integral part, I enjoy it so much, and I couldn’t relive it as vividly without the video.”
Then we head out, armed with cameras and a stuntman. I’m following a guy called Danny MacAskill, a professional street biker from the Isle of Skye who owes his remarkable career to the rise of viral video, and for whom it’s use has become instinctual. When he arrives in a new environment, he sizes up jump angles and camera angles more or less simultaneously. When he rides under something with a camera on his head, he ducks that extra couple of inches so intuitively that it might be an extension of his brain. In the past, MacAskill says, “all I thought about was riding my bike”; now “capturing it is definitely in my mind. I take a camera with me whenever I’m out, just capturing little snippets, things I wouldn’t normally do, and I push myself, because I know there’s going to be an audience.”
As he lines up his tricks, the dozen or so of us who are following him frantically vie for prime camera angles, a dozen telltale beeps as each trick gets underway, a paparazzi ribbit. One particularly enthusiastic follower lets out an admiring “shut up!” each time he pulls off another move, and I, too, get quietly absorbed in the satisfactions of capturing each one from a sufficiently awesome perspective. Eventually, we meet up with Paul, and the two pull off a synchronised jump that has to be seen to be believed. At least, so the others tell me; I can’t make my camera switch to the right mode, and as a whoop of approval goes up, I realise that I’ve missed it. “No problem, man!” someone says. “Here, you can watch my tape!”
When I leave, I find that I want to try it for myself. But the truth is, I can’t match Paul and MacAskill. Their daily routine is constructed around the defiance of death; mine mostly around the route of the 390 bus. All the same, the GoPro’s stated purpose is increasingly democratic; if anyone can buy a camera for £99, it presumably follows that anyone’s life is worth watching. And so I decide to put this idea to the test.
Admirable sentiment though it is, it is not one I immediately live up to when I run to the post office with a camera strapped to my chest, nor indeed when I reach the GP’s and find it’s shut, nor when I get on my bike, camera now just above my eyes, and head to the office. I’m embarrassed when I arrive, and fix my eyes firmly on the floor as I scuttle to my desk. But as the day proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear: no one is remotely fazed. When I go out for lunch and walk through a busy pedestrianised area, red recording light flashing on my forehead, I’m amazed at how few people give me a second glance. Later, on the way to the pub, I go past one of those mysterious council camera vans, and I could swear the lens gives me a collegiate wink.
The footage, when I watch it back, isn’t exactly an adrenaline rush. You’d have to be mad to sit through it, and no one else ever will. Sitting at my desk and spooling it back, I’m reminded of another line of Eggers’: “One of the problems of SeeChange,” he writes, “is that even when there are cameras everywhere, not everyone can watch everything.” Then it occurs to me: I can’t pull off a wheelie, but in other departments, it’s easier to match the professionals. I pause the video, and cue up a song: Run Boy Run by Woodkid, one of the advertising tunes of the moment, percussive and urgent and vacantly portentous. I hit play. Suddenly, I’m not just a guy on his bike. I’m a guy going somewhere.
Going somewhere slowly, mind you. Watching myself potter around a stationary doubledecker, or waiting at a red light, I’m struck by the disjuncture of image and reality – of the life you live and the story you put on top of it – and the whole thing dissolves again. All the same, I can see the appeal of the slogan we were presented with in Shoreditch. “This is your life,” GoPro exhorts us. “Be a hero.” And, for a long, dishonest second, I have felt like one.
• This article was amended on 4 October 2014, correcting the spelling of fazed from its homophone, phased.
