The Universal Scream

The Universal Scream project began as a promise Basil Pao made to his then six-year-old daughter that he would photograph her favourite toy with children he met around the Pacific Rim during his yearlong journey with Michael Palin for the travel series Full Circle . The toy in question was a five-foot tall inflatable doll based on Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream of Nature and the first pictures were taken with a group of Inuit children on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Straits in August 1995. Eighteen years have passed and his daughter Sonia is now almost 25, but a version of the inflatable Scream still travels with Pao—and he continues to photograph it whenever he gets a chance. From the Sahara to the Himalayas, with novice Buddhist monks in Bhutan to Yanomami warriors in Amazonia, the doll has been photographed in hundreds of locations with a cast of thousands from all around the world.