"VARIATIONS OF THE SCREAM"
Self-portrait series, 2025
How can we visualize a scream that never escapes the lips, one that resonates only inside the body? In this conceptual and deeply personal series of five experimental self-portraits, Oxana Guryanova explores the silent, internalized forms of emotional rupture. Drawing inspiration from Edvard Munch’s iconic painting The Scream, she translates its existential anxiety into a contemporary visual language, shaped by her own experiences of grief, fear, disintegration, and longing.
Created in the aftermath of personal collapse, the sudden loss of her father, the emotional toll of war, and a painful divorce, each portrait reflects a different state of inner tension. These are not theatrical expressions, but quiet visual echoes of a voice breaking inside.
Working with diverse photographic techniques, flatbed scanning, digital exposure with color processing, analog Polaroid, digital collage, and a black-and-white interpretation, Guryanova approaches the same inner scream from five distinct aesthetic and emotional angles. The result is a layered and intimate visual research: a study of what happens to the scream when it is trapped.
The choice of five self-portraits is intentional. Just as Edvard Munch created five known versions of The Scream (two paintings, two pastels, and one lithograph), Guryanova responds with five visual interpretations, each executed in a different photographic technique. Each self-portrait thus becomes both a personal response and a contemporary reimagining of invisible pain.
This series does not aim to imitate Munch’s painting. Instead, it resonates with his questions: What is the shape of invisible pain? Can inner chaos be seen and if so, how?
Variations of the Scream is both a reflection and a release, a project about the fragile boundaries between presence and absence, between image and emotion.
Variation #1 – “The Distorted Scream”
Created using scanography with experimental motion, this image visualizes a fragmented sense of self. The distortion reflects inner disintegration and the emotional rupture of an identity shaken from within.
Variation #2 – “The Split Scream”
Created using digital multiple exposure with RGB color separation, this image symbolizes internal conflict and fragmentation. The split colors reflect a divided identity and the emotional tension of being torn between opposing inner states.
Variation #3 – “The Silent Scream”
Created using thermal printing on receipt paper with a Check camera, this image reflects speechlessness, emotional invisibility, and exhaustion through its faded surface and visual silence.
Variation #4 – “The Collective Scream”
Created as a digital collage from multiple mirrored self-portraits, this image symbolizes collective fear and the dissolution of individuality. The repeated reflections form a visual echo of societal conditions, blurring the boundary between the personal and the collective.
Variation #5 – “The Fleeting Scream”
Created using an unedited Polaroid instant photo, this image captures the transient nature of emotion and memory. Its softness and imperfection reflect the fading traces of a scream — one already dissolving into silence and emotional exhaustion.