Pilgrim in the Mist
Image Date: 4 September 2015
It was early morning but already hot; sky murky, air heavy and moist. Remnant mist clothed the trunks and trail further up the mountain. I’d barely begun the climb up the pilgrim path, and had already paused to take a breath beneath the slender trunks of cedar. I was scanning the trees to the left through my viewfinder, framing a section of fog-shrouded forest, when a flash of white on the periphery startled me. I swung the camera right.
Pilgrim in the Mist, Tokushima, 2015
The henro-san (pilgrim) was descending from the direction of Unpenji, (雲辺寺; usually translated as “Hovering Clouds Temple”), my destination that humid late-summer morning. I try to avoid obtrusively photographing pilgrims and other people I encounter on walks, but this gentleman had unknowingly provided the key element in a nice composition, and my racing heartbeat jolted me from my worn-out, sleep-deprived torpor. I swung the camera left again, just a tad; the lens was wide enough to capture both the vastness of the forested slope and the human venturing through it not far from the edge of the frame. He was dwarfed by the primeval gloom of the mountain forest, but his white T-shirt and pilgrim hat lent his figure a certain presence.
This is a picture I love despite its technical shortcomings, because it evokes both the mysterious essence of the O-Henro (88-Temple Pilgrimage) and the ancient beauty of Shikoku. The shortcomings? I was focusing manually and a trunk at about the same distance as that one in the middle had been sharp; the pilgrim is slightly out of focus, and my settings were not ideal for a moving subject in low light. I saved it somewhat in my edit: black-and-white lent it a sort of timeless feel, and I managed to mask some of the wishy-washy colour and digital noise. I also regained some of the definition in the human figure, but actually love that he remains enigmatic, a ghost in the forest, where countless thousands of prior ghosts have passed, leaving no trace. And that sharply focused tree trunk seems to divide the scene vertically into halves: the human world of paths and travellers, and the forest realm with its mist and shadows and secrets.
The pilgrim smiled and we exchanged greetings as we passed. Presumably he’d spent the night at the temple, which at just over 900 metres has the highest elevation of the 88 on the Henro path. It must have seemed a remote and perhaps forbidding prospect for walkers in ancient times, and is one of the temples the pilgrim community calls a nansho - difficult place. It’s also listed as the first of the Kagawa Prefecture temples despite its position just over the border in Tokushima. For the pilgrim emerging from the foggy woods, leaving this temple numbered 66, the greater part of his physical journey was behind him. But I was doing this, the first of my two walking pilgrimages, in reverse order, starting at #1, then going anti-clockwise to #88 and the slow countdown around the island and back to #1.
In just a minute or two, as I resumed my climb, I would be that pilgrim in the mist.
