$45.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover
132 pages with 91 color photographs by the author
11.0” x 9.0” (landscape/horizontal)
ISBN: 978-1-960521-14-9
Forthcoming in March 2026
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the
Center for the Study of Place.
by William Wylie
with an essay by Pico Iyer
A unique look at walking the famous Eighty-Eight Temple Pilgrimage in Japan!
The Eighty-Eight Temple Pilgrimage, on the island of Shikoku in Japan, consists of walking to eighty-eight Buddhist temples and numerous other sacred sites along a circular route of about 1,200 kilometers (746 miles). Its legendary status is rooted in the life of the monk Kūkai (774–855 CE), who trained and performed miracles at some of the sites along the path. Kūkai (later known as Kōbō Daishi) would found the Shingon sect of Buddhism in Japan, and devotees would embark on this pilgrimage to honor him. Today, individuals take on the pilgrimage for various reasons: from religious devotion to the physical and mental challenges of completing the circuit and the chance to experience Japan’s natural beauty and vernacular landscapes.
As photographer William Wylie approached his sixtieth birthday, he saw an opportunity to mark the auspicious occasion with a symbolic journey, one that would offer some kind of transformative experience and allow him to indulge in his enduring interest in rambling. Not a practicing Buddhist but with a deep connection to nature and an interest in the power of places, he arrived prepared for austere temples and raked stone gardens on the Shikoku trek. What he found in between the eighty-eight temples was equally provocative and memorable to experiencing the temples themselves. Everywhere he walked a landscape spread out before him like a beautiful accident, where the aim of the day’s walking was immersion, to slow down and “listen for the crickets behind the bath house,” as Issa, the famous Haiku poet, would say.
The Eighty-Eight: Photographs from a Japanese Pilgrimage features ninety-one of Wylie’s captivating photographs from his journey as well as an introductory essay by the noted writer Pico Iyer, who writes, “What you seek may be nowhere but right here, right now, and William Wylie offers that truth with rich surprise and depth as he walks along a path that can teach many of us, profoundly, how to live.”
About
About the Author
William Wylie is Commonwealth Professor of Art at the University of Virginia. His photographs and films have been shown nationally and internationally, including 100 Great American Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum, Pompeii: Photographs and Fragments at the Yale University Art Gallery, Route 36 at the Joslyn Art Museum, and Visions du Reel at the International Film Festival in Switzerland. Wylie’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Yale University Art Museum, among others. His previous books of photographs are: Riverwalk: Explorations Along the Cache LA Poudre River (University Press of Colorado, 2000), Stillwater (Nazraeli Press, 2002), Carrara (Center for American Places, 2009), Route 36 (Flood Editions, 2010), Pompeii Archive (Yale University Press, 2018), and A Prairie Season (Flood Editions, 2020), all concerned with recognizing how landscapes are created and transformed and how we find our places in them.
About the Contributor
Pico Iyer is the author of seventeen books, which are translated into twenty-three languages, including those whose subject is Japan: A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations (2019), Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells (2019),and The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto (1991), all published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Praise
“The minute I join William Wylie on the walk he took through Japan’s quietest and most rural island, dressed as all pilgrims are in white, carrying a staff and wearing a sedge hat, I recognize the land where I’ve been living since 1987. It’s what I think of as the forgotten, all too easily overlooked Japan. To walk along these paths with William Wylie and his photographs is to take on the slow and patient attentiveness of a pilgrim, everything seen at a human pace and with the eyes of a passerby who seeks to remain anonymous.”
—Pico Iyer, from his introduction
Slideshow
My Place
When I left the south suburbs of Chicago after high school, I was looking for My Place. I’d spent years designing my escape, reading about homesteading in the Yukon, building Earthships in New Mexico, and dirtbagging in Yosemite, but I didn’t yet have what I would have called “a plan.” I knew I liked the mountains of Colorado from an earlier Outward Bound experience, so I loaded up my VW Bus and drove west. Soon I was on the Great Plains, with all the space I could imagine and a vast armada of billowing cumulus clouds drifting across the sky. I stopped to make a self-portrait at the welcome sign on the Kansas/Colorado border in recognition of my discovery.
I settled in Fort Collins. It was sort of a cowboy town then but also full of late-to-the-scene hippies and a blossoming outdoor rec crowd. I fit right in. No need to go to college just yet; there was exploring to do. I was going up into the mountains as often as I could, but the place I was strangely attracted to was out east, in the Pawnee National Grasslands. I could drive out from town on State Highway 14 for thirty minutes, turn off onto a Weld County road somewhere, and be set adrift in the immense open space. I’d start out walking through a wash with some cottonwoods, maybe flush some deer or antelope and slow down, adapting to the pace of the place. Maybe a small town like Grover or Keota would draw me in. The quiet dusty street or rodeo grounds were just perfect in my mind, and I could usually find a sandwich in the local store. In the afternoons, I would often climb to the top of Pawnee Buttes. A sandstone overlay protected the twin sedimentary rock formations from erosion. They rose there, only 300 feet above the prairie, a home place for peregrine falcons and an occasional eagle. The view seemed Himalayan to me.
But this amazing place had a dark side, too. The Pawnee Grasslands were home to twelve Minuteman nuclear missile silos, part of a larger network across the Great Plains. The locations as launch sites also made them targets. I’d try to make photographs of the silos, but Air Force security would quickly show up if one lingered too close to the fence. After a while, I found the grass and cottonwoods and clouds more compelling subject matter anyway.
Years later, after moving to Virginia, I came back to the Pawnee to make a film and book about a small high school outside of Raymer (pop. 110). Because of the size of the school, they did not have enough players to field an eleven-man football squad and played six-man instead. I spent a glorious fall season out on the grasslands with the team. Sometimes, before school let out, I’d drive the prairies looking for solitary trees to photograph. I’d see one, off on a ridge, all by itself, looking worn and tired from exposure to the wind and sun. Surrounded by the space, the trees seemed to embody something huge about the world, dendritic patterns reaching out to the sky; they countered my micro-level involvement with the ranch boys on the Prairie School football team (I tallied their weekly stats).
So many great artists and writers have explored “my place” and created work of deep feeling. Robert Adams, Merrill Gilfillan, and Worthington Whittredge come to mind immediately. I’m sure there are others who, like me, stopped in awe under those flowing clouds and said, “I’m here.”
Copyright © William Wylie. All rights reserved.