Tourism and Amateurism - Text 4
The video “GoPro: Karma on the Road,” for example, shows the adventures of a young family hitting the road in a microbus along the West Coast of the United States. The images show several banal moments of their long voyage, but it also documents their most exciting experiences (including tobogganing, trying out an extreme kind of swing, their use of a slackline, etc.), all filmed from a variety of points of view including images of them driving through breathtaking landscapes captured by a drone in the sky. Through these perfect images of activities each as impressive as the last, against uplifting background music, “GoPro: Karma on the Road” illustrates all the potential of an action camera such as the GoPro.
As an amateur, the GoPro user who becomes aware of these references can, to follow Albera’s argument, choose to devote themselves (or not) to the pursuit of the ideal they construct. But this is just a goal to attain, not instructions on the path to take to get there. This advertising, a mere element of a more encompassing amateur-dispositive, shows only the final product towards which users should strive without revealing the technical and industrial conditions necessary to achieving such images.
