Photographers Are Livid About a Photo Festival’s Camera-Busting Rage Room

The Belfast Photo Festival is still over a week from starting in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but it has already instigated serious outrage among photographers. The Belfast Photo Festival will include a major interactive public exhibition that invites visitors to pick up a hammer and destroy “obsolete” cameras, and not everyone is on board.

In the week since PetaPixel originally reported on the Belfast Photo Festival’s “Camera Obsolete?” exhibition, the reactions have been polarized, at best.

“‘Camera Obsolete?’ is a participatory installation and major public exhibition confronting the collapse of photography’s mechanical era,” Belfast Photo Festival explains. “Conceived and produced by Belfast Photo Festival, audiences are invited to destroy, dismantle, recast or resist the transformation of obsolete cameras into new sculptural forms.”

Festival organizers describe the installation as “part participation, part spectacle, and part material transformation,” and claim it raises questions about concepts such as authorship, truth, and photography’s broader shift away from a physical, tangible medium.

“‘Camera Obsolete?’ is designed to confront audiences with the pleasure, discomfort, and contradiction of destroying physical cameras, a choice many creatives now make silently and privately when choosing to prompt images instead of make them,” says Toby Smith, the Belfast Photo Festival’s Director of Development.

Starting on June 4, visitors 18 years and older can attend the Belfast Photo Festival, pick up a hammer, and enter “The Destroy Room,” hellbent on smashing cameras into smithereens. Those who want to take a more precise route to destruction can meticulously pull cameras apart to see how they work. Visitors can even bring their own camera or choose from the “hundreds” available on display.

All guests, regardless of age, can participate in careful dismantling and sculpture building. Children are only prohibited from wielding instruments of destruction and smashing cameras.

After getting their fill of violence or curiosity, visitors are encouraged to work with fellow guests to rearrange the camera part detritus into new sculptural forms. The resulting sculptures will remain on display throughout the exhibition and eventually become a permanent public sculpture at the Belfast Botanical Gardens.

Photographers Respond

Unsurprisingly, the concept of destroying old cameras is very upsetting to some photographers.

“Incredibly sad to see this — what an incredibly wasteful thing to do with such valuable resources — working or not — nobody is making spares for the film cameras that exist. The idea of melting down and re-casting magnesium alloy bodies is highly toxic and ill informed. To perceive such an act as somehow creative and to celebrate such wasteful destruction is sickening,” writes online camera retailer Analogue Photography on Facebook.

The Belfast Photo Festival saw Analogue Photography’s message on Instagram and turned it into multiple chapters in an Instagram Story, suggesting that the project is not wasteful, since visitors will be transforming the broken camera parts into new artwork. The organization also says that this type of project helps the next generation of photographers by allowing them to look inside cameras and see how the mechanics work.

In response to another upset photographer, thomas_ward123, who wrote, “As a film camera collector i hope you never have a single good day ever again,” the Belfast Photo Festival explained that for £10, or just over $13, visitors can adopt a camera and take it home, rather than smash it to bits.

“Adopt a camera. Tactile and truthful. £10 per item, film available,” Belfast Photo Festival writes on Instagram.

“Is this a bit? You’re doing a joke right? ‘Come destroy hundreds of vintage cameras!’ Is seriously a genuine pitch for an event? We live in a world marred by the consequences of our obscene levels of waste as a species and an artistic statement the photo festival is willing to get behind is ‘Come make it worse’. Class work guys,” writes photographer Adam Bradley.

“Im not interested in building a sculpture with the remnants of a now broken camera, im concerned about the waste and destruction this project is encouraging,” Bradley adds.

“Please tell me this a joke,” says Raoul Ries.

PetaPixel’s Take: The Potential Loss of Precious Camera Parts

Art — and I think it’s safe to say that a sculpture built by people using smashed-up camera bits does qualify as art — can often prove upsetting. Thankfully, it is certainly not a prerequisite for artistic value that people universally like something. Some of the most powerful and impactful artworks have elicited strong negative reactions.

It is entirely fair for photographers to dislike the upcoming “Camera Obsolete?” installation at the Belfast Photo Festival. Even if every single camera harmed in the process was already broken, perhaps beyond cost-effective repair, that doesn’t mean every component in a camera is useless. For the vast majority of old cameras, there aren’t any new parts available for repair, so components must be salvaged.

It is hard to estimate how many potentially useful parts will be maimed beyond recognition or utility during the Belfast Photo Festival. The potential lost value to vintage camera owners may outweigh whatever intrinsic artistic or cultural value a sculpture may have. Further, even if the initiative is not a total waste, that doesn’t mean it’s not inherently wasteful.

I like the idea that visitors to the festival will be able to learn more about how cameras work by disassembling them. I like the idea of people collaborating on a sculpture. I even generally like the concept of artwork that bothers me. But I don’t like the idea of cameras being smashed to bits.

Hopefully, people will be able to visit the Belfast Photo Festival when it opens on June 4 and rescue some interesting pieces of photographic history before they are destroyed, or as the Belfast Photo Festival may prefer to describe it, transformed. Maybe the final sculpture will even look amazing, although I’m not sure that really matters very much.

Image credits: Belfast Photo Festival