Shikoku 88 – The Book

It took me quite a while… but I have found more and more that letting a pile a pictures from an adventure sit for a while, it gives me a new fresh look at them and lets me choose the best pictures in a more efficient way. When I have just returned, the personal memories of how, when and where a picture was taken are still so overwhelming, that these feelings somewhat overpower the feelings that might emit from a picture when someone else is looking at it. And when I want to create a book, it is of course also for my own memory of the adventure to enjoy years later when looking through it, but it is foremost for other people, people who might be interested in Shikoku, or the O-Henro pilgrimage, yes, who might even be already planning it, or who have done it themselves already… but they can never have or have had the same experiences or feelings that I had when doing it… So a photograph might be meaningful to me for some reason, but it does not come across in the photograph at all when someone else looks at it. So in a sense, for a book the photograph must in itself convey something, and I find it easier to get a feeling for that when I allow myself some time before selecting them…

Long story short, the book was produced as a kind of paperback magazine, so it doesn’t become too thick, heavy and expensive. It has 220 pages, and is divided into five chapters: Getting there, Temple, Landscapes, Townscapes, and Conclusion. There is a little text here and there, but I want this more to be an inspiration for others who might be interested to do something like that themselves, or maybe a picture book that is beautiful to look through for people who have already done the Shikoku pilgrimage themselves. It is definitely not an information repository … those kinds of books and websites exist already.

Here is the link to buy a copy of the book as a paperback printed copy or as a digital pdf: Shikoku 88 Book