Val Brinkerhoff’s quest to photograph sacred spaces around the world began with a curiosity about the shapes and symbols of the temples and tabernacles of his own faith. “I wanted to really understand what a temple was communicating,” he recalls. “I knew the (Latter-day Saint) standpoint, but I wanted to study sacred architecture of many different faiths.”
The quest led the then-associate professor of photography at Brigham Young University across 45 countries over five years, documenting everything from standing stone circles in Scotland to Islamic mosques, from Catholic cathedrals to ancient pyramids. As he studied at the massive stones of Stonehenge, the angled tight joints in Incan walls and soaring steeples in Europe, he saw patterns that communicated themes of connection between earth and heaven.
Ancient structures like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza incorporate precise alignments with the stars and the sun. Traditional Christian church steeples with square bases, octagonal midsections and spherical tops represent the progression from earthly to heavenly realms.
“It’s really a visual language,” Brinkerhoff explains in what he wants people to see in the thousands of images he created from his journeys. “I wanted to teach people how to read a building like a book and understand the language.”
To Brinkerhoff, 69, understanding sacred architecture reveals humanity’s universal yearning for the divine. The structures he photographed were constructed across millennia by diverse cultures but speak a common visual language about our relationship with the sacred — a spiritual heritage embedded in stone that can inspire believers today.
This story appears in the March 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.
