Arts & Culture | February 12, 2025

How Canyon de Chelly Brought a Photographer Back to Life

Wayne Martin Belger set out to make indelible photos of a mystical site on the Navajo Nation. First he needed to relearn how to walk

Photographer Wayne Martin Belger created these striking platinum palladium prints by exposing the negative onto a paper coated with platinum and palladium salts, producing a special sharpness and subtlety. Belger built this vintage-style view camera specifically for this story, crafting the body from local Arizona mesquite and juniper and installing a late-19th-century French landscape lens in front, to give the prints a timeless feel. Belger calls it his “Tséyi” camera.

Alanna Airitam

Ted Scheinman

Photographs by Wayne Martin Belger

Wayne Martin Belger’s photographs sometimes look like the product of time travel, or peculiar magic. In a way, they are.

In his journeys around the globe, Belger takes on grim assignments and produces photographs that have a quality of revelation. He’s reported for Smithsonian from a refugee camp in Greece, made intimate portraits of Native activists at Standing Rock and embedded with Zapatistas at an armed compound in Mexico.

For many of his stories, Belger builds a custom camera from boutique materials, often drawn from the landscape he’s about to photograph. His bold material choices, in his cameras and in his prints, always serve a specific end: For his ongoing “Untouchable” project, about people living with HIV and AIDS, Belger installed a filter that circulated HIV-positive blood, adding a poignant, striking tinge to each shot.

In early 2022, Belger got the assignment from Smithsonian to tag along with researchers doing remarkable work at Tse Yaa Kin, a sacred Native site within Canyon de Chelly National Monument, on the part of the Navajo Nation overlapping with Arizona. Belger brought more than just his portfolio to the assignment: He’s been rock climbing since 17 and today is an undisputed master, capable of ascending and descending Tse Yaa Kin’s sheer, sometimes eroding walls.

A shot of the tower at Tse Yaa Kin. Wayne Martin Belger

Belger was jazzed by the assignment and began planning a new camera that would suit it. Then, one day that April, when he was riding home to Tucson from California on his 1985 Harley Davidson, another vehicle swerved at an intersection and ran right over him.

“I actually went underneath the SUV at 65 and bounced around quite a bit,” Belger recalls, mildly.

At the hospital, doctors found the crash had broken 14 bones, severed the link between Belger’s spine and right leg, and destroyed two vertebrae. (“I vaporized L1 and L5. The doctor said I didn’t break them, crack them or anything. He said they exploded.”)

Instead of building a new camera, Belger had to get rebuilt himself. He spent the next three months in the hospital, relearning how to walk with 35 bolts, screws and rods newly installed in his body.

If he was ever going to get to Canyon de Chelly, Belger would need something close to a miracle. He found it in meditation.

“I got to a point where I was meditating four to five hours a day, just doing body scans and focusing on moving my big toe and then my foot, and then everything started coming together. I did so much work that after I got out of the hospital, I went to physical therapy twice, and the therapist said, ‘Look, there’s nothing that we could do to help you more or anything, because you’re doing far beyond what you should be doing.’”

Meanwhile, Belger says the Canyon de Chelly assignment loomed as a potent inspiration to heal. “I promised myself I would get there—one way or another.”

One of Belger’s doctors credited his remarkable recovery to his decades of rock climbing. “He said my back muscles were so massive and so strong that it actually kept the spinal column together.”

Three or four months later, “I was in Canyon de Chelly and climbing up a 100-foot cliff.”

A view of the canyon from Tse Yaa Kin. Wayne Martin Belger

Belger’s custom-made camera, constructed with local Arizona box elder, mesquite and juniper. Wayne Martin Belger

And he had time to create a new camera, after all. For this vintage-style view camera, Belger crafted the body from local Arizona mesquite and juniper and installed a late-19th-century French landscape lens in front, to give the prints a timeless feel.

His expertise at climbing ended up proving crucial to the researchers at Tse Yaa Kin, a group led by Angelyn Bass, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, and Joshua Ramsey, an archaeologist with the National Parks Service.

“They knew I was a climber, and they actually hired me to set up all the rope systems, the pulley systems, the hauling systems to bring scientists up in the Canyon de Chelly up into Mummy Cave, and to get all the gear up there.”

To arrange this elevated perspective onto a window at Tse Yaa Kin, Belger hauled 8-foot-long wooden planks, plus a ladder, up the sheer cliff to the sacred site. Wayne Martin Belger

The tower at Tse Yaa Kin, on a platinum-palladium print, and shot on Belger's homemade camera. Belger arranged the composition to match a photo taken by Simeon Schwemberger at the site in 1905. (When you compare the two photos, you can see some repairs that a Smithsonian team made more than a century ago.) Wayne Martin Belger

Belger said spending time with the researchers and with friends on the Navajo Nation impressed on him the urgency of photographing the site now, before these extraordinary structures degenerate further.

“You can see the climate change in action, and they’re getting more and more fires along the rim plus all the erosion destroying some of the structures. So I wanted to document what is here, before something tragic happens.”