A Photographer’s Pyramid Scheme Begins to Pay Off

For the previous ten years, the Los Angeles–primarily based artist Ian James has crisscrossed the United States on a pilgrimage to {photograph} the nation’s artifical pyramids. He’s develop into somewhat obsessive. “I started finding the pyramids on several blogs that looked like they were from the late ’90s or early 2000s, then I began reverse-image-searching those buildings to find more, seeing what Google would spit out,” he advised me. “It kind of spiraled out from there.”

In 1922, the crypt of a minor pharaoh was found just about intact, whipping up a frenzy of Egyptomania seen in all places from the flapper’s extreme bob to the spire of the Chrysler Building. Fifty years later, the wildly profitable exhibition Treasures of Tutankhamun toured the West, and New Age pyramids started to crop up all through North America. Given the relative dearth of historic monuments within the US, such constructions provide the compensatory fiction of a mythic nationwide previous, a postmodern necropolis of company headquarters, amusement parks, protection contractors, knowledge facilities, casinos, and assertion properties.

“I wanted to explore how the pyramid is a sacred architecture that has come across from antiquity—how it’s been emptied out of its original purpose and meaning and filled up with all these late-capitalist virtues,” mentioned James, who has gathered greater than 100 of his images into a brand new guide, Pyramids: Special Economic Vortex Zones of North America. Familiar sides embody the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and the Bass Pro Shops in Memphis, however lesser-known landmarks abound, every its personal sphinxlike riddle.

The polychrome compound of the Buddha Maitreya’s Church of Shambhala Vajradhara Maitreya Sangha, on a mountaintop in Clear Lake, California, was designed by a person who claims to be Jesus Christ reincarnate, and who recruits individuals to hawk one thing known as Soul Therapy. On the outskirts of Salt Lake City, a somewhat nondescript pyramid serves because the meditation middle for a faith known as Summum, billed as the one supplier of “modern mummification.” The Luxor’s 273,000-watt mild beam, essentially the most highly effective lamp on earth, has spawned a whole ecosystem of bugs, bats, and owls. Then there’s the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, a concrete mastaba in North Dakota unveiled in 1975 as a radar system to intercept Soviet ballistic missiles, solely to be decommissioned that very same 12 months; the damage was purchased in 2012 by a gaggle of Hutterites, who not too long ago bought it to a bitcoin developer (a missed alternative for the Dia Art Foundation). Surprisingly absent amid these “economic vortex zones” is essentially the most distinguished American pyramid of all; simply take out a greenback and it’s there, with its floating, all-seeing eye.

Like that of the New Topographics artists who remodeled the panorama style with their photos of factories and tract housing within the deindustrializing Seventies, James’s medium is arguably discovered sculpture as a lot as pictures. But not like, say, the watershed water towers documented by Bernd and Hilla Becher, his topics usually seem at indirect angles, peeking out from bushes or buildings, golden-hour mirages within the desert of the actual. Their unusual serenity belies the various perils of pyramid-hunting, recounted in a digressive journey diary James consists of within the guide. Among them: inclement climate, damaged tools, nefarious resort breakfasts, and hostile property house owners. Curiously, he nearly by no means tries to go contained in the buildings.

“Despite the form’s connotations with permanence and stability, the turnover rate for contemporary pyramid occupancy is high,” writes Aurora Tang in an essay for the guide. “Pyramids are often novelty or vanity constructions, which prioritize aesthetics over utility. Their sloping walls make them costly to maintain and difficult to subdivide or adapt.” The world’s first surprise nonetheless stands, however all the pieces else appears to be falling aside. These photos arrive to us at a time when—as President Trump asperses affordability itself as a “hoax” perpetuated by his rivals—the American dream looks as if the most important pyramid scheme of all. In any case, James has begun to look farther afield. “I keep thinking, Should I stop photographing pyramids and do something else? But then I get lured back into it. I was traveling in Europe recently, and began thinking of a follow-up book.” He paused. “There are a lot of pyramids in Germany . . .”

Pyramids: Special Vortex Zones of America was printed by Special Effects in October 2025.