I had devised this pinhole project (link) for myself and was working with a camera I had built of foamcore and blackwrap. Wayne happened to be one of the subjects for the series and when he saw me ‘trying’ to work with my camera he said, “I’m going to make you a camera with a tripod mount”. I thought that was fine, he’d take my foamcore idea and put a sturdy mount on the bottom. He borrowed a 4×5 film holder from me to take measurements from and went to work. A few months later he handed me what is now known as The Bee.
The Bee is a 4×5 pinhole (film) camera that is machined from aluminum (aluminium for you non-American folk). It features two windows with antique key holes meal bug, beetle, and a large, black, carpenter bee. The back is spring loaded for holding the film holders in place. The tripod mount is stainless steel, and very sturdy I might add. The poem on the top is lifted from a Pablo Neruda poem, “El Insecto”. The aperture is approximately f350 (give or take), and is the original pinhole that was on my foamcore camera. The Bee is a tank of a camera weighing in at 5.8 pounds (2.6 kg). For a closer look at The Bee, see here: Stills of The Bee.
Based in Tucson, AZ, Wayne is a self taught painter, sculptor, machinist, and now photographer who works with found objects, and those objects he can’t find, he makes. The Bee was the first of many cameras to descend from his mind. As the numbers grew, they increased in complexity, depth, and some may say…. okay, more than some have said, into weirdness. The two that are made from human skulls tend to be the focus of any of his gallery shows. If I were to have any of his other cameras, I’d want the Dragonfly which is his second camera and a perfect brother to The Bee, and his underwater camera because well, it’s an underwater, 4×5 pinhole camera!
You can see more about Wayne, his cameras, photography, and art at BoyofBlue.com
Bee Camera: The first of Wayne Martin Belger’s pinhole cameras from Brian Booth on Vimeo.