A Photographer’s Pyramid Scheme Begins to Pay Off

For the past ten years, the Los Angeles–based artist Ian James has crisscrossed the United States on a pilgrimage to photograph the country’s manmade pyramids. He’s become rather 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 told me. “It kind of spiraled out from there.”

In 1922, the crypt of a minor pharaoh was discovered virtually intact, whipping up a frenzy of Egyptomania visible everywhere from the flapper’s severe bob to the spire of the Chrysler Building. Fifty years later, the wildly successful exhibition Treasures of Tutankhamun toured the West, and New Age pyramids began to crop up throughout North America. Given the relative dearth of ancient monuments in the US, such structures offer the compensatory fiction of a mythic national past, a postmodern necropolis of corporate headquarters, amusement parks, defense contractors, data centers, casinos, and statement homes.

“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,” said James, who has gathered more than a hundred of his photographs into a new book, Pyramids: Special Economic Vortex Zones of North America. Familiar facets include the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and the Bass Pro Shops in Memphis, but lesser-known landmarks abound, each its own 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 man who claims to be Jesus Christ reincarnate, and who recruits people to peddle something called Soul Therapy. On the outskirts of Salt Lake City, a rather nondescript pyramid serves as the meditation center for a religion called Summum, billed as the only provider of “modern mummification.” The Luxor’s 273,000-watt light beam, the most powerful lamp on earth, has spawned an entire ecosystem of insects, 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, only to be decommissioned that same year; the ruin was bought in 2012 by a group of Hutterites, who recently sold it to a bitcoin developer (a missed opportunity for the Dia Art Foundation). Surprisingly absent amid these “economic vortex zones” is the most prominent American pyramid of all; just take out a dollar and it’s there, with its floating, all-seeing eye.

Like that of the New Topographics artists who transformed the landscape genre with their pictures of factories and tract housing in the deindustrializing 1970s, James’s medium is arguably found sculpture as much as photography. But unlike, say, the watershed water towers documented by Bernd and Hilla Becher, his subjects often appear at oblique angles, peeking out from trees or buildings, golden-hour mirages in the desert of the real. Their strange serenity belies the many perils of pyramid-hunting, recounted in a digressive travel diary James includes in the book. Among them: inclement weather, broken equipment, nefarious hotel breakfasts, and hostile property owners. Curiously, he almost never tries to go inside 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 book. “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 wonder still stands, but everything else seems to be falling apart. These images arrive to us at a time when—as President Trump asperses affordability itself as a “hoax” perpetuated by his rivals—the American dream seems like the biggest 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 published by Special Effects in October 2025.