Basil Pao is best known as Michael Palin’s stills photographer. He’s the faithful chronicler of their global travels together for the BBC over 25 years, with several beautiful books to his credit.
On many of their trips, Basil took along a deflated Scream doll, his daughter Sonia’s second-favourite toy. Aged six, she begged her father to take her teddy bear Clara along to photograph on his travels, but Basil always refused, saying Clara would take up too much precious space. He was finally persuaded to take along the Scream on his odysseys instead. This was the blow-up version of what Michael Palin describes as Edward Munch’s “Icon for stress” in the preface to Basil’s new book, The Universal Scream.
Munch’s vision
A hundred years ago yesterday, Munch described on his way home seeing an extraordinary glow in the sky and having an experience which felt like “a scream passing through nature.” This became the subject of many paintings and proved to be the most valuable scream in history, changing hands at Sotheby’s for US$119million last year. Munch’s mummy-like figure with hands held protectively up beside its face Is not a happy image, it expresses something discordant and disturbing, writes Michael Palin. “What started as a scream against nature has increasingly come to represent a scream against the pressure modern life. The arms pathetically raised to block out fear, noise, oppression, lack of time, lack of space, lack of love,” he writes, adding that it has also become a brand and a trademark.
Cheung Chau native Basil’s new book features the inflatable Scream posing in many eccentric locations round the world, from Alcatraz to a graveyard for Russian tanks, a shipyard in Dalian and on the Great Wall of China.
Taken during BBC trips
