The journal of his travels became the remarkable travelogue 'Narrow Road to the North' (Oku no Hosomichi) with forty-six locations along his elliptical route around Japan being identified with a verse relating the poet's observations and musings on nature, at turns full of grandeur and sadness.

Infused with a sense of memory and of the eternal represented in the common-place Basho's classic drew upon a literary heritage stretching back to the 7th century and the verses collected in the Man'yoshu (collection of ten thousand leaves). It was from this first great anthology of 4,416 poems, that the first utamakura - literally, pillow of the song - appeared in written form.

Originally a root word or phrase resonant with implied references utamakura could be a spring mist, the red maple leaves of autumn or a particular stream or mountain. In some cases the place became tied to a particular poetic element; utamakura would not just be Mount Yoshino (in modern-day Nara prefecture) but specifically the sight of cherry blossom at Yoshino.

In successive poetry collections utamakura came to be predominantly associated with identifiable locations, and as Japanese literary culture became increasingly self-referential and divorced from its Korean and Chinese roots a mythological landscape evolved that bound the country together.

Basho's journey was part of a tradition of the wandering poet that went back to the travels and writing of Saigyo over five hundred years earlier, and Monk Noin one hundred years before that. By the time Basho set off 'dreaming of the full moon rising over the islands of Matsushima', a place still widely considered to be one of the most beautiful in Japan, utamakura had been referenced and idolised during centuries of lyrical poetry. This was especially true of the numerous pine-topped islands of Matsushima bay, and Basho pointedly avoided including a poem on this landscape claiming that 'my pen strove in vain to equal this superb creation of divine artifice'.

In the context of classical uta Basho's major innovation was the promotion of the haiku from its previous status as a light or comic entertainment to a form that had the weight and import of the longer traditional choka and tanka forms. A poem from the barren north coast leg of the Oku no Hosomichi can serve to illustrate the new depth that Basho achieved with the short 5-7-5 syllable haiku structure:

Lying over angry seas
and the distant Sado Island -
the arch of the Milky Way

At the heart of this poem is the aesthetic ideal of sabi that infuses so much of Japanese verse. Closely related to the concept of yugen - the aesthetic of profound spiritual mystery - sabi was propounded by Fujiwara Shunzei (1114 - 1204) in the late Heian period and could be loosely described as a sense of beauty arising from the contemplation of desolation, solitude and stillness.

For Basho sabi gave a seemingly objective description the power of symbolism and hence emotional and philosophical resonance. To this basic essence was also combined hosomi (root translation - fineness or elegance), a subtlety of expression and shiori (sensitivity or tenderness) the quality of perceptive observation. A successful combination of these elements would result in an expression of kojo - what could be translated as 'surplus meaning' - which raised a simple observation into a poetic truth.

In the sense that the utamakura as a literary device is an attempt to capture the essence of a place (hon'i) while at the same time acting as a channel for the composer's aesthetic and emotional expression it bears an interesting relationship with the landscape in the visual arts. The comparison becomes more involved with the deceptively simple, sketch-like form of the haiku and the prospect of objectivity in photography - brief moments of observation that both fix and transcend time.

Kojo can be interpreted as the notion of 'equivalence' in photographic theory wherein literal subjects become signifiers for psychological or emotional experience.

Utamakura were celebrated for their beauty, their literary associations, their emotive connotations, or some purely associative quality. Generations of poets visited and wrote about these sites, adding layer upon layer of depth and complexity to their mystique.

Some survive as beauty spots in contemporary Japan, others have changed irrevocably in the intervening centuries. The former beauty spot of Tago no Ura, for example, on the Pacific coast south of Mount Fuji, is now notorious for pollution caused by paper mill effluent. Sites that are preserved as a consequence of their association in the public mind with historical culture draw such huge numbers of visitors that the attraction of the place itself is often supplanted by the overwhelming human activity that occurs there.

The massive disparity between the high culture of uta and haiku sensibility and the everyday culture of advertising, cigarette butts and commuter trains forms the basis of the Utamakura Sites series.