I recently spoke to Toby Smith, the director of development and fundraising for the Belfast Photo Festival – which this year is hosting probably the most controversial photography exhibition in history.
Camera Obsolete will give visitors the choice between smashing up a camera, carefully dismantling it or buying it for a small fee, saving it from a violent death, with Smith saying the idea is to confront the rise of AI “so that we don't just happily slide quickly into a computational era,” forgetting all about mechanical cameras.
The announcement of this exhibition, as you can imagine, had the photography community up in arms, with people angry at the destruction of perfectly good cameras that could otherwise go to collectors or be put to working use.
While I stand with the wider community, when I take my love for cameras and distaste for unnecessary destruction out of the equation, the bigger issue that this exhibition represents becomes glaryingly clear.
The core reason these cameras are up for sacrifice is because of the frightening rate at which tech churn sees products become relics of history, quickly being replaced by newer models just a few years after their release.
Smith told me that among the doomed are older film cameras such as Ricoh 35mm rangefinders and a host of “wonderfully functioning Zenits”. There are also DSLRs including Canon EOS 300Ds, released in 2006, and even lots of “really nice Pentaxes from like 10 years ago.”
It might not seem like it now but, at one point, these cameras were all state-of-the-art, and the thought of smashing them up with a mallet would have been ludicrous.
But if these cameras were made obsolete, in some cases by just a decade later, what's to stop us from mashing up, say, a Sony A7R VI in ten years from now – as by then this model will surely be in such low demand because of its outdated specs?
I can’t deny how incredible modern DSLR and mirrorless cameras are, and that it is exciting to see how developments like AI-powered autofocus have taken photographic possibilities to new heights. However, we all are going to have to admit at some point that this incessant stream of bigger and better can't go on forever.
When do camera manufacturers decide that there are enough models on the market and that instead of releasing new ones, perhaps we retrofit older ones with newer specs – or even design cameras in a modular way that enables them to be refitted with minimal waste?
I’m not going to turn this into an environmental rant, and I certainly don’t have all the answers, but at the core of this discussion is the undeniable reality that the production and consumption of new cameras uses up irreplaceable natural resources that end up having a surprisingly short shelf life once the next model comes out, usually just three to four years later.
As for the cameras that will be destroyed during the Camera Obsolete exhibition, Smith said that a sculpture using the material waste will be made by participants, and that the event organizers are in talks with the Belfast Botanic Gardens for this sculpture to be on public display there for 50 years.
Despite this, I still see the exhibition as a bit of a silly one, needlessly promoting destruction instead of inviting people to use the cameras in the way they are designed – to capture beautiful images.
I think this would do much more for stoking the fire of mechanical photography that Smith and his colleagues think generative imagery is slowly putting out. But will the exhibition worsen the rate at which we are filling the world with new cameras and subsequently making current models obsolete? Also no.
This is the bigger issue here, and one that the photography (and tech industry as a whole, for that matter) has to answer for – as well as consumers.
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