OPENING RECEPTION:
FRIDAY, JANUARY 10th
5:00 - 7:00 PM
“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.”
from The Poetry of the Everyday, by Pico Iyer
Walking is a powerful way to experience a place. What at first might seem a limitation becomes, instead, an incredible form of release. Walking alone along the Shikoku pilgrimage, known as The Eighty-Eight for the number of temples honoring the Buddhist monk Kobo Daishi, deepened my awareness of the very practice of looking and forced me to slow down and not be too quick to assume I understood all that I saw.
More than thirty-five years ago, the photographer Robert Adams recommended Oliver Statler’s book, Japanese Pilgrimage, as a rumination on walking. I had recently walked the 126-mile length of the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado, photographing the working landscapes along its banks. Statler’s book made me want to visit Shikoku. As I neared my sixtieth birthday, I considered how to mark that auspicious year. I felt an intense need to unclutter my mind and reconnect with natural rhythms. Having worked with a large-format view camera for more than forty years, I knew I could not lug around that equipment during the pilgrimage, so I planned to leave my camera at home. Less weight, of course, but I imagined not having it would change my outlook. Luckily, friends convinced me to take a small hand-held camera, pointing out that the size and format would allow me to modify my approach to making photographs while allowing for freedom of movement from one scene and place to another.
What I didn’t anticipate was how much the pilgrimage would involve experiences outside of myself. While the temples were official destinations, I found myself drawn to what happens along the route, as I walked the distances between the eighty-eight sites.
On the pilgrimage I woke up every morning to the realization that the only thing I needed to do that day was walk. Of course, I needed to eat and drink along the way and make it to the next place where I planned to spend the night. But those necessities would get taken care of in due time. In that moment all I needed to do was pay attention and walk.
