Belfast Photo Festival lets visitors smash cameras in rage rooms
Belfast Photo Festival is putting hammers in visitors’ hands, letting them smash old cameras in a rage room while asking what photography becomes in the AI era.
A camera can be a tool, a trophy, or dead weight, and Belfast Photo Festival is leaning hard into that tension with Camera Obsolete?, an exhibition that lets visitors smash old bodies to pieces, pry them apart with precision tools, or even repair them back to life.
The show runs from 4 to 28 June 2026 at Belfast Exposed, 23 Donegall Street, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In the Destroy Room, visitors 18 and over can take a hammer to cameras in a ticketed session, with advance booking strongly advised. Belfast Photo Festival says people can bring their own camera or pick from the hundreds on display, then choose whether to destroy, dismantle, repair, recast or resist. It is the kind of hands-on spectacle that makes sense only in a moment when photographers are arguing not just about gear, but about whether the gear still means anything.
The festival is pitching the project as more than catharsis. The exhibition page says Camera Obsolete? forces questions of authorship, truth and the erosion of photography as a physical, tangible medium. That lands squarely in the 12th edition of Belfast Photo Festival, which Belfast City Council describes as the largest annual photography event in Northern Ireland. The festival itself says it is the UK and Ireland’s largest annual photography festival, and this year’s theme, Horizons, is framed by AI-generated imagery, automation and algorithmic seeing.
That framing matters because the frustration behind the hammer is bigger than nostalgia for old DSLRs and film SLRs. Toby Smith, Belfast Photo Festival’s director of development, said the real question now is not just what a photograph looks like, but who made it, what machine made it, and whether it can still be trusted. Camera Obsolete? turns that anxiety into something physical. The machines can be shattered, stripped down, or mended in bespoke disassembly and restoration areas, where an old camera can be adopted and brought back into use.
The aftermath does not disappear when the session ends. Belfast Photo Festival says the dismantled pieces will stay on display through the run and will eventually help shape a permanent public sculpture for Belfast Botanic Gardens. The exhibition sits alongside other work in the programme, including Thaddé Comar’s How Was Your Dream?, made during the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and Vahram Aghasyan’s Modality, a reflection on failed futures and unfinished Soviet residences in Armenia.
The festival also has a free afternoon symposium on 27 June 2026 about photography in the digital age, as part of the Irish Photo Network’s Altered Images: Photography & Truth in the Digital Age programme. That puts the camera-smashing spectacle in its proper context: not a stunt, but a blunt answer to a field where the camera is still beloved, still contested, and increasingly treated like a disposable symbol.
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