It seems to be the open season for physical attacks on photographers. Closest to home, freelances Marc Vallée and Jonathan Warren were attacked just outside the entrance to the Climate Camp on Sunday. A group of people from the camp had gone out to a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) stall outside the entrance and were arguing with the newspaper sellers there.
When the two photographers began to take pictures of the altercation, the climate campers turned on them, shouting aggressively that the photographers had not asked their permission to take photographs.
The bookstall was in a public place and on common land, and so was clearly a situation in which no permission was required to take pictures. What the group from the Climate Camp were clearly doing was attempting to apply the camp’s ‘media policy‘ – its rules on photography – outside the camp.
The argument between one young man and Vallée continued, with the man insisting that he delete all pictures of him and the photographer refusing on principle to do so. The man threatened to grab Vallée’s camera and smash it or delete the pictures himself. After a few minutes things appeared to have calmed down enough for the photographers to walk away, but as they did so the man lunged and tried to grab Vallée’s camera. Warren stepped in and shouted at him, and was kicked him violently in the stomach.
Following this, both photographers managed to back away and leave the scene without further blows. Both are photographers who invest considerable time and effort in covering and trying to get publicity for protests and movements such as the Climate Camp. As I know from my own experience, it isn’t an area which provides an easy or even a good living, and those of us who attempt it do so largely from a dedication to the various causes.
Although it happened outside the camp, there does seem to be a clear link with the media policy inside, one that I, like Vallée and Warren, find unacceptable, and I quoted both of them in a feature about it last week, Climate Camp Again.
As I wrote in another feature, “The policy appears to be driven by a few individuals with paranoid ideas about privacy and a totally irrational fear of being photographed. It really does not steal your soul!” Another photographer to write about it is Leon Neal, and the comments on his site are also worth reading. We can only hope that any future Climate Camp events will learn and try to adopt a more constructive approach to photographers and getting positive media coverage
The photographers decided not to go to the police and make a complaint, but instead wrote in an open letter to the Climate Camp “We ask the man who assaulted us to come forward and apologise and that the camp’s organisers unequivocally condemn his actions.” The NUJ has also backed their call for an apology. Presumably it should not be hard to identify him from the photographs they took.
Unless the camp can in some way deal with this incident and take action to prevent similar problems in future, it would seem to call into doubt their camp’s insistence on taking responsibility for its own policing and the agreement of the police to keep off site – and more or less out of sight.
And on PDN last Friday, links to videos of three rather more serious attacks on journalists in the USA this month.
In Doylestown, Pennsylvania, the father of a woman who had just entered a guilty plea to faking her own abduction attacked several members of the press outside the court. While an angry woman in Cocoa Beach, Florida attached 2 TV crews with a garden hoe, damaging a video camera while they were covering a story about teenage girls charged with dancing at a strip club. The final case was in Norfolk, Virginia where a reporter and two photographers investigating a scam got into an argument with the the owners of an employment services company and both sides are suing for assault.
Let’s hope things quieten down in September.
