Having been present for some of the camp’s arrival you write about your intentions to return to ‘document the subtlties of camp life’ as if arriving was the main event and the camp itself was some kind of afterthought. This is somewhat akin to covering a football team arriving at a stadium and then failing to cover the match. This is also very similar to van der Zee’s assertion that having put the toilets up things are boring, which entirely fails to comprehend what the camp at Blackheath is about.

Unlike previous years at Drax Kingsnoth and Heathrow, the camp at Blackheath was not centred around a mass action but was meant to revolve around workshops training and discussions. This was well advertised on their website, alongside the extensive workshop programme, however it seems that mainstream journalists have simply failed to understand this.

I’m far from convinced that taking photos (the medium you work in) of a workshop on geoengineering or climate science would be very interesting or would do a remotely adequate job of conveying the content of the discussions. The original post refers instead to printed text media which complains that the campers have been bored after the set up, as though there has been nothing for them to do, when in fact there have been a plethora of workshops and discussions about climate change and practical steps towards solving the problems, and a second article which ignores all the events which have taken place at camp, complaining of a lack of focus on the issues.

As regards the seperate issue of media access, watch the camp tv film about media policy.

Climate Camp is far from perfect and critiques are certainly welcomed, but they ought to be critiques of policy, events and action – in other words critiques of content rather than the shallow complaints that things are boring because people aren’t fighting police or journalists whinging that as the only people allowed to perform commercial actions on site they are only given 9 hours of access a day.

No photographer needs to have permision to take photographs of an individual in a public space. No photographer needs to have a minder to walk around a public space. As such, while I had intended to come back and document the subtleties of camp life, I did not see the point in returning (I was not alone in this). I might as well have just asked the police on their views on the camp to get a balanced viewpoint, rather than be an unwitting mouthpeice for climate camp propaganda.

To add to this were the two alleged physical assaults on photographers yesterday by climate camp members. ‘Just been assaulted by a camper – for taking a pic – outside the camp’-Mark Vallee (Twitter), ‘Just been kicked in the chest by a camper, defending a photographer from a camper trying to grab his camera to delete a picture’ Jono Warren (Twitter). Both are seasoned photojournalists, with a history of covering protests.

For what it is worth I was and am still generally positive about climate camp.

Climate camp needs to be able to accept critique, it is far from perfect. If it obstructs journalists in doing their job, it should not wonder why it gets ignored.

http://www.dark-mountain.net/about-2/the-manifesto/

it’s an interesting exploration of the myth of the splendid isolation of the human race