The Belfast Photo Festival will open on June 4 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with a participatory installation that invites visitors aged 18 and over to pick up a hammer and destroy "obsolete" cameras — and the announcement has already fractured the photography community more than a week before the first visitor walks through the door.

The exhibition, titled "Camera Obsolete?" and conceived and produced by the festival itself, frames the destruction as an inquiry into the end of photography's mechanical age. Organizers describe the project as "part participation, part spectacle, and part material transformation," and claim it raises questions about authorship, truth, and photography's broader shift away from a physical, tangible medium.

Toby Smith, the festival's Director of Development, is explicit about the provocation. "'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," he says in the festival's statement. The reference to prompting images rather than making them places the installation squarely in the current debate over generative imagery and what is lost when the camera itself becomes optional.

The installation operates on several levels. A space called "The Destroy Room" gives adult visitors hammers and free rein to smash cameras to pieces. Visitors can bring their own cameras or choose from what the festival says are "hundreds" on display. Those preferring precision over violence can carefully pull cameras apart to see how they work — an activity open to guests of all ages, with children barred only from the smashing itself. Afterward, visitors are encouraged to collaborate on rearranging the debris into new sculptural forms. Those sculptures will remain on view throughout the exhibition and will eventually become a permanent public sculpture at the Belfast Botanical Gardens.

The reaction, in the week since PetaPixel first reported on the project, has been polarized at best — and the fiercest criticism comes from the film photography community, which sees the installation not as art but as vandalism of a finite resource.

"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," writes Analogue Photography, an online camera retailer, on Facebook. "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."

The festival has answered its critics directly, reshaping the Facebook complaint into a multi-chapter Instagram Story. The project is not wasteful, the festival argues, because visitors will transform broken parts into new artwork, and because dismantling cameras lets a new generation of photographers see the mechanics inside. The festival has also built an escape hatch into the concept: for £10 — just over $13 — visitors can "adopt" a camera and take it home instead of destroying it. "Adopt a camera. Tactile and truthful. £10 per item, film available," the festival writes on Instagram, in a pointed rejoinder to one collector who wished the festival ill.

Some photographers remain unconvinced that the adoption scheme redeems the premise. "Is this a bit? You're doing a joke right? 'Come destroy hundreds of vintage cameras!' Is seriously a genuine pitch for an event?" writes photographer Adam Bradley. "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." He adds: "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." Other responses run shorter and blunter. "Please tell me this a joke," writes Raoul Ries.

The strongest argument against the installation is material rather than aesthetic. Even if every camera slated for destruction is already broken — perhaps beyond cost-effective repair — that does not make every component useless. For the vast majority of old cameras, no new parts are being manufactured, so repair depends entirely on salvage. It is impossible to estimate how many potentially serviceable shutters, prisms, gears and focus screens will end up maimed beyond recognition over the course of the festival, but the aggregate loss to the repair economy could well outweigh whatever cultural value the finished sculpture carries. An initiative can fall short of total waste and still be inherently wasteful.

And yet the outrage itself is part of the work's design. Art that bothers people is not thereby bad art; some of the most consequential artworks of the last century elicited fury on first display. A sculpture built collaboratively from smashed camera bits qualifies as art, and the discomfort it produces — the instinctive flinch of anyone who has ever nursed a broken Praktica back to life — is precisely the reaction Smith describes when he speaks of confronting audiences with "pleasure, discomfort, and contradiction." The installation's sharpest irony may be that the anger of film devotees demonstrates better than any wall text how much meaning still attaches to these machines.

There is genuine merit in the gentler halves of the program: letting people disassemble cameras to understand them, and building something collectively from what remains. The destruction is the part that curdles it.

When the festival opens on June 4, the most consequential visitors may be the ones who arrive with £10 and leave with a rescued camera — photographers salvaging pieces of mechanical history before they are, in the festival's preferred vocabulary, transformed. The finished sculpture at the Botanical Gardens may even be striking. Whether it justifies hundreds of hammers is the question the festival has now, deliberately, put to its own audience.