Pilgrim’s Progress: New Book Documents a Sacred Japanese Journey

When photographer William Wylie set out to walk Japan’s famed Eighty-Eight Temple Pilgrimage, he expected austere temples and raked stone gardens. What he didn’t anticipate was how powerfully the spaces in between would shape his experience.

Those moments — farmers in fields, musicians under bridges, moss-softened trees — anchor The Eighty-Eight: Photographs from a Japanese Pilgrimage, Wylie’s newest book, out in March from GFT Publishing with an introductory essay by travel writer, essayist and novelist Pico Iyer. The volume features 91 photographs from Wylie’s two-month, roughly 1,200-kilometer (746-mile) journey around the island of Shikoku, following a route rooted in the life of the monk Kūkai, founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism.

“Walking is a powerful way to experience a place,” Wylie writes in the book’s afterword. On the pilgrimage, he woke each day knowing “the only thing I needed to do that day was walk,” a focus that became “an incredible form of release: free of distractions, free to think, free to see.”

Wylie, Commonwealth Professor of Art in the University of Virginia’s College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, has long been drawn to walking as a way of seeing, and he teaches a popular Engagements course on the art of walking that explores pilgrimages, protests and other artists who use walking as a creative act.

Earlier in Wylie’s career, a mentor had recommended a book about the Shikoku pilgrimage after Wylie completed his first book, Riverwalk, for which he hiked the length of a river in Colorado. The idea lingered. Years later, while visiting Japan during his wife’s residency, Wylie learned that a former student had moved to Shikoku for the pilgrimage itself. “It was like at that moment, I remembered my interest in the pilgrimage,” he said.

The timing mattered. After turning 60 — a milestone he calls “a very auspicious time” in Japanese culture — Wylie decided to return to Shikoku and complete the circuit. At first, he didn’t plan to produce a book. 

“I wasn’t even going to make photographs. I was just going to do it for the experience,” he said, but a nudge from that same mentor changed his mind. “He said, ‘You’re a photographer. You’ve got to take a camera.’”

So Wylie packed a small digital camera — leaving behind the large-format view camera he’s known for — and treated it “almost like a sketchbook,” capturing what caught his eye along the route. The result is a collection that favors the everyday over the monumental, the human over the heroic. 

“While the temples were official destinations,” Wylie said, “I found myself drawn to what happens along the route, as I walked the distances between the Eighty-Eight.”

Iyer’s introduction reflects that sensibility, noting how Wylie’s images echo a Buddhist attention to the present moment. The book’s design reinforces it, too, with gatefolds of temple details and interspersed haiku that function like visual instants in time.

Wylie also oversaw the book’s production in Italy — a unique experience for most authors. Being “on press” meant standing beside master printers as they fine-tuned colors, balancing cyan and magenta to bring the images to life on the page. 

“It’s all this interesting kind of chess play,” he said, describing how tiny adjustments to one color ripple across others. “Those pressmen are really, really good at what they do.”

The Eighty-Eight is Wylie’s eighth photography book, but the process still surprised him in one way. “From the time the publisher said, ‘Let’s do this,’ until it comes out, it’s going to have been almost two years,” he said. Seeing the book move from pilgrimage to page made the long arc feel tangible.

In the end, the project itself echoed the journey, creating opportunities to slow down enough to notice what often goes unnoticed in photos that capture seemingly ordinary moments and details: the light under a bridge, weathered hands and the quiet drama of a landscape.

“Walking alone deepened my awareness of the very practice of looking,” Wylie writes. “Some things exist only momentarily on the face of this Earth.”