Jaime Bailléres

Jaime Bailléres worked as a photojournalist from 1990 to 2000 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, directly across the border from El Paso, TX. He is among a group of photographers in Juarez whose self-made mission is to document and expose the extreme violence and poverty in this border city of almost two million. These photographers often shoot with rationed film and earn only $50 to $80 per week from the half-dozen newspapers who employ them. Bailléres finds and documents murder victims, happenings on the border, and daily life in the shantytowns and on the street. In Bailléres's words, “we are like firemen, only here we fight fires with our bare hands.”

Bailléres was born in Delicias, Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1960. He started photographing at a young age in 1974 and has worked professionally as a photographer since 1985, including ten years as a photojournalist in Ciudad Juárez (1990-2000). He has since left his career as a photojournalist to pursue doctoral studies in visual arts. Bailléres is a sociologist and has been a research professor in visual arts at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez since 1997. His work was included in Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (Aperture, 1998) by Charles Bowden, which received the Infinity Prize Publication Award in 1999 from the International Center of Photography, New York, NY. His work is held in the collection of the El Paso Museum of Art and was exhibited in Witness: Contemporary Mexican Photojournalism at the MoCP in 2004. A monograph of Bailléres's work entitled Ciudad Juarez: Mirror of the Future. Photographs by Jaime Bailléres was published in 2006.

Text © Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018