On POV & the Audit, 2025.
First Amendment Audits are the practice of intentionally filming (notionally) public spaces. A location ‘passes’ the audit if the auditor is allowed to film without disturbance. With an extreme reading of free speech rights (hence the reference to the First Amendment of the American constitution), auditors toe, and often cross, lines of harassment, with audit films often descending into verbal and physical confrontations.
I’m fascinated by this subculture, a particularly strange niche of right-wing nutjob that obsesses over mangled understandings of social and legal rights, self-publishing aimless street debates over their assumed right to film unremarkable buildings.
The photographic weapon of choice for auditors is the GoPro, which they wield in a POV style, hiding their identity, and presenting their perverse civil activism in a subjective documentary manner. This essay presents my loose ideas on a potential dilemma of causality in the ideology of these videos, in the history of the camera as the arbiter of true representation, in the GoPro’s design, in attention economy social media production, and in the social effects of the strategies of neoliberal capitalism.
Image: Screenshot of a YouTube upload by ‘DJ Audits’
The notion of the ‘photographic’ (in turn describing video) has been endowed with a burden of verisimilitude since its inception - the earliest technologies that produced images our contemporary eye would identity as photographs directly inscribed light (mediated through a lens and an exposure time) onto a polished sheet of silver plated copper - a ‘true’ representation of a subject. In his 1844 book The Pencil of Nature, William Henry Fox Talbot lauded this novel technology, describing images “impressed by Nature’s hand; and what they want as yet of delicacy and finish of execution arises chiefly from our want of sufficient knowledge of her laws”, placing the photographic as the heir to painting as the rationalising visual order - mastering perspective and representation, and thus staking claim as the most rational form of representation.
Talbot’s claim of a mastery of perspectival order and representation of nature is called into question constantly in contemporary life, such that the initial response for many on viewing an image of, say, a natural disaster, a spectacular example of the power of nature, is to look for clues of doctoring, tailoring, or outright fabrication - yet the photographic has certainly come to succeed painting when striving for accurate representations of reality. Harun Farocki coined the term ‘operational image’ to describe the wholly representational photograph as part of his 2000 installation Eye/Machine I, describing images “without a social goal, not for edification, not for reflection”. Eye/Machine I was a collection of images taken by military surveillance devices in the Gulf War, often from cameras attached directly onto missiles, announcing a visual media landscape where the digital image has replaced the human eye as the witness to war.
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In 2002, surfer Nick Woodman imagined another development in the history of aesthetic representation - an affordable, smash-and-waterproof camera that could allow the amateur extreme sport enthusiast to capture themselves in action, in a way that was previously exclusive to the camera crews of sponsored athletes. The GoPro has only really advanced in image resolution and storage capacity since its first digital edition in 2006, with minor variations on the iconic compact design and fish-eye lens.
Alongside its durability, one of the main successes for the GoPro company was their development of chest and head mounts for the camera, allowing the user to operate the camera hands-free. This was the first ‘true’ point-of-view, or POV, photographic equipment made commercially available to consumers.
The POV shot has existed in some form from some of the earliest cinema works, being utilised notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960, with the iconic shower scene in Psycho containing shots from the perspective of Marion as she is stabbed to death by a silhouetted figure. However, in most pre-GoPro cinematic examples, the POV is simply another aspect of the trompe-loeil of the picture, with actors performing in front of camera operators as if it were an imagined audience of one.
Image: behind-the-scenes; shooting a kissing scene in Peep Show
‘POV’ as a disambiguation has since become standard in contemporary parlance, perhaps most popularised by the eponymous meme format (“POV, you’re [object/subject in a situation]”), or as the porn category, where the innate voyeuristic nature of the camera and the seductive, immersive qualities of the POV shot are perhaps most exploited.
There’s an argument to be made for the POV; when utilised by a documentarian and shot from the body-mounted camera, as providing us with the objective truth in the photographic predicted by Talbot, an honest subjectivity as almost a literal ‘perspective’ or eye, and providing a succinct quality of immersion to a narrative - or as in RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, where the technique lends immense emotional weight to an autobiographical narrative.
But this would be to ignore all that mediates the spectatorship of a POV work, in the social, political and technological contexts of its production and dissemination.
The technical innovation of the GoPro, intended to capture the niche hobbies of extreme sports enthusiasts, also innovated an entirely new hobby itself - in a novel form of civilian activism. The GoPro, when attached to the body via a head/chest mount, allows the photographer to film hands-free. In popular legend, the handshake tradition developed as an expression of peaceful intent; the occupation of both parties’ dominant right hand signifies they aren’t hiding a weapon. I read the GoPro POV shot as a contemporary betrayal of this contract, in which one side of the transaction, possessing the technology to film hands-free, has a technological and physical advantage over the other, wielding power in both surveillance and the dexterity of a free dominant arm. The individual on the receiving end of an audit can only retaliate (without violence, which they know is being recorded) with their own recording device - their phone, which leaves them with a single free hand.
The spectator’s experience of an audit film is mediated by the aesthetics of the GoPro - the fish-eye lens, the grainy quality (in earlier models), the hands gesturing on either side of the frame - does this visual language signify, or codify, the extreme beliefs of the filmmaker?
For the auditor, to their imagined audience, the GoPro signifies truth - The POV shot is first person, personal, perhaps relatable - the breakdown of a just society they see before them can be experienced by sympathetic members of their community. It signifies an incognito, inoffensive manner of filming - a small grey metal box smaller than your phone, just sitting on their chest - that betrays the impudent nature of walking into someone’s space with a head-and-or-chest-mounted camera, a microphone, and a drone ready to be flown above them. Its prosthesis is experienced as the ‘mind’ or the ‘heart’ of the auditor, filmed from the head or the chest - did the GoPro itself create, or accelerate, these extreme actions?
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A typical audit film is begun by the filmmaker without much in the way of cinematic flourish. A POV shot of the exterior of an industrial, judicial, or institutional location (think a warehouse, a factory, or a hospital, a police station, a prison car park) that the auditor is walking slightly aimlessly around, beginning a monologue with the familiar cadence of YouTube videos (“Whats up guys, we’re …”), and the auditor explaining their location.
This will typically be followed by a hard cut to a confused individual asking why their workplace is being filmed, and if the auditor could refrain from it. The auditor will defiantly continue to film, often insisting on producing further photographic technologies (drones, etc.), until a heated argument begins, with misunderstandings and misquotations of image and free speech rights bandied around by both parties, until the situation is escalated, by physical conflict, private security, the police, or a combination of all three.
Image: Screenshot of a YouTube upload by ‘Auditing Britain’
The global hegemony of neoliberal capitalist ideology, accelerated by Silicon Valley tech CEOs, necessitated a breakdown in both the written and unwritten contracts that define social norms and relationships. In 2009, around the same time that GoPro began consolidating its design, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel wrote that “the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms” - Quinn Slobodian posits that this is an aspiration by the super-powerful and super-wealthy towards “zones” completely free of the regulations inherent to sovereign nations. The process of this shift involves strange manipulations of social and political rules and contracts, “engaging in the rituals of statehood rather than contesting them” - the ideology and mechanics of which have trickled down into everyday life, and pushed understandings of social contracts to extremes.
Flagrantly ignoring image and intellectual property rights was essential to Silicon Valley in developing AI image generators and LLMs; I’ve found that transcriptions of audit videos often possess the same uncanny soulless textual qualities as earlier versions of ChatGPT.
Their targets a mixture of government contracts, centuries-old political doctrine (and dogma), and media psyop, hyper-individualism became an aspiration.
In the UK, we can look to Thatcher and her contemporaries as the progenitors of this thinking; Thatcher famously announcing the non-existence of society, or Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s (William, father of Jacob) The Sovereign Individual, which announced an appeal to individual control over circumstance rather than a collective one.
Audit films from the UK are steeped in this individualist dogma that is incredibly untethered from nationalism or the collective, yet embody the sense of Britishness that is inescapable as a member of British society - the locations, think a grey industrial estate, a 70s new-build police station, or the debates that ensue, imbued with a politeness until a point when the auditor has been annoying for an excruciating length of time. The auditor’s reference to free-speech and image rights & laws are also so inseparable from state control (and the wider acceptance of these rights by society) that their videos become accidental confessions of members of society misled and radicalised by late capitalist thinking.
Perhaps the frustrating contradictions espoused in these videos is not incidental to neoliberal production, but essential to it? The argument present in every audit film (I’m yet to find a shooting location that has ‘passed’ an audit), the verbal & physical as well as the ideological is necessary for these videos in both their logic and their production - ad revenue on these videos when they amass views is significant. Whereas in the past civilian activism was relegated to a DIY underground (think zines & posters, blogs) the most extreme views & actions can be self-published and viewed by millions, producing revenue, if picked up by algorithms that prioritise engagement (clicks and watch times), positioning auditors as freelance, paid, cultural producers.
Here lies an issue that isn’t exclusive to audit films, but that underlines them - how much of the outrage central to their narrative is reproduced by their creator, in multiple locations, for the sake of views? How much of the highly individualistic ideology and understanding of social life performed by these filmmakers is informed by their requirement to keep posting, to seek conflict, to make quick money?
In my film Audit, I restage an audit film, but one that starts in the auditors home. He films his entire life, including using the bathroom, arguing with his wife, and a commute to a location. The process of the production of the audit film becomes an everyday working experience. Once the conflict arises, the footage shot by a worker from the mustard factory shooting location, and a civilian who joins the debate, are incorporated into the film, the edit becoming a dizzying mess of gazes and spectators. The conflict isn’t really resolved. The film is opened and bookended by a Shirley Collins interpretation of the traditional folk song ‘Geordie’, positioning the auditor as a legend of a poor man who ‘shoots’ to feed his family.
Still from Audit, Peter McNelis
Anna Kornbluh identifies the cultural style of late capitalism as ‘immediate’ - a quality imbued by our contemporary economic and cultural conditions of ‘disintermediation’ (interestingly, Kornbluh cites the opening shot of Uncut Gems, which pulls out into the gruesome details of colonoscopic videography, as the shining example of immediacy as contemporary video style (“How close can the spectator get?”) - could the physical embodiment in the head of the videographer in POV be even closer?). Yet the audit film feels to me incredibly mediated - in the aesthetic of the GoPro, in the necessary prosthesis of the GoPro’s technology, in the drawn-out debates that ensue, in the unintentional autobiographical storytelling of the characters who come and go from their workplace.
The dangers of the voyeuristic qualities of the GoPro POV are readily apparent, and judicial measures have been taken to minimise their potentially radicalising effects. One such case study is that of the 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, which was livestreamed to Facebook via a head-mounted GoPro for 17 minutes. New Zealand’s government quickly labelled the footage as ‘objectionable’, making distribution or exhibition of the footage punishable by jail sentence (a high profile case being white supremacist Philip Arps, who received 21 months for sharing the video). Stuart Bender of Curtin University cited the livestream as being integral to the aims of the perpetrator, describing the shooting as “a form of 'performance crime' where the act of video recording and/or streaming the violence by the perpetrator is a central component of the violence itself, rather than being incidental."
A review for Farocki’s Eye/Machine describes how “representational technology becomes an experience in and of itself, which at least partly eclipses what it purports to reveal. Similarly, our minds organize incoming information into images and narratives that may or may not be true to the facts. The nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that ostensibly led to the United States’ invasion of Iraq are a case in point.” This piece fails to properly cover the contemporary sociological and political situation that pushes members of society to the hyper-individualist fringes of right-wing ideologies, but I believe it’s still pertinent to ask - could technologies of representation themselves be leading auditors into a pursuit of their own personal nonexistent threat to existence?