XYZ Books, 2021. First edition.
Hardcover, 56 pp., b/w and color illustrated throughout, 210 x 255. Photographs by Pedro Guimaraes. Drawings by Nuno Engstrøm Guimarães. Mask sculptures by Sara Bichão. Design by Dayana Lucas.
Second Prize Kassel Dummy Awards 2020
Shortlisted for Fiebre Dummy Awards 2020
Selected as one of the Best Books of 2021 by Vanessa Winship
Rato, Tesoura, Pistola gathers together photographs by Pedro Guimarães, produced in collaboration with Nuno Engstrøm Guimarães (drawings, 7 years old) and Emma-Sofie Engstrøm Guimarães (monster pancakes, 5 years old). Sara Bichão kindly offered her masks that become part of a familiar entertainment revealing what an author can be, literally “one who causes to grow,” and not only in a parental relationship.
Combining the drawings of his children together with portraits of them playfully or simply relating with the father’s camera, this book is a manifold of experiences and artistic attitudes in which photography works as an intertwining element and where design strategies activate it as a device involving the reader himself in the game. As the title of the book suggests, “Mouse, scissors, gun”, and Pedro explains in the book presentation: “This is how we play together, how we pretend there is no such thing as the vast emptiness that keeps us apart during most days of our lives: 2500 km of land and water, to be precise, the sheer vastness of Europe. But most days is not all days of our lives, right?”. And the time we spend flipping through this book, opening the folds that constitute its very semantic structure, has the sweet and captivating flavour of the magic time described in Pedro’s book, shortening distances and creating magic worlds with the interaction of basic, but powerful elements.
Read more:
Collector Daily, L'Oeil de la Photographie
