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.
