OM²—Ordinary Moments+

For over 20 years, Basil Pao followed Michael Palin (and his BBC crew) around the world. He documented their journeys from the North to South Pole and around the Pacific Rim. They retraced the footsteps of Hemingway, traversed deep into the Sahara, and trekked up and down across the Himalayas. They crisscrossed post-Iron Curtain Eastern Europe and surveyed Brazil from the Amazon to Iguazu Falls. Their collaborations resulted in 11 bestselling illustrated books. In between the Palin journeys, Pao travelled extensively for a variety of clients that took him to remote and exotic locations across the globe, including an epic journey through every province across the length and breadth of China to create the classic China Revealed.

OM²—Ordinary Moments+ is the distilled essence of all the miles travelled and the tens of thousands of pictures captured. This anthology of 140 photographs illuminates the purity of Pao’s vision and contains some of the maestro’s personal favourite reportage images—reaching back to ‘The Kiss’ at Gorge du Verdon from 1978 to ‘The Ballerina’ in Hong Kong from 2021.

In his Introduction to the book, Michael Palin writes: “These are the crème de la crème of someone who always insists on the highest standards. This collection is a perfectionist’s choice of a perfectionist’s work… Amongst them are those unique and inspiring images which contain a universal truth. My favourite of these is of a statue of a hunched soldier in The Great Patriotic War Museum in Kyiv. The statue is a remarkable enough portrayal of the suffering of the common soldier, but Studio 8 EditionS what Basil adds to it is the young girl playing on the hill with her arm outstretched towards the crumpled f igure. An ordinary moment which turns the scene into an unforgettably poignant image of the wastefulness of war. Photographs like this not only delight the eyes but open them as well. They show you the wonders of the world, but they also make you think. These are ordinary moments of extraordinary power.”

Basil Pao is a photographer and graphic designer from Hong Kong who has worked extensively behind the scenes for various film and television productions, notably with the BBC and Michael Palin on numerous travel programs. His stills, travel essays and corporate works have been published widely around the world.