Jaume Parera

Jaume Parera defines himself as a visual artist with a great passion and dedication for photography. A means of expression that allows him to interpret reality and create a new particular and singular look.
He holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and a master’s degree in New Documentary Photography from Labasad. Since 1999, he has participated in exhibitions, festivals and video selections both nationally and internationally, and has received the first prize Nuevas Tendencias Generación 2000 from Caja Madrid with the work Psycho. Recently, he has been selected for Descubrimientos PHE 2022.

0,99€ is a fieldwork of more than two years of photographing in street markets and their spaces of socialisation. I am fascinated by the culture of effort, innate in street market stallholders, who struggle to dignify their trade generation after generation. It is therefore a tribute to their perseverance, dedication, and passion for their work.
I am interested in connecting with these people and their closest living environment, through sincere and honest photography: glimpses of what we find before and after a frenetic commercial activity.
As Rafa Badia writes so well in the book’s prologue, “Past, present and future meet face to face every morning in the town or city where the street market is held”. Hence my personal visual testimony about this great social microcosm, and my interest in showing the beauty of a visually chaotic and ephemeral place. The flea market is a modular spectacle that, for the vast majority of its customers, is rude and perhaps ugly, but also necessary to keep its community alive.
Through the images of 0,99€, I show the complicity and commitment of this clientele that seeks, as Badia points out, “the best of the best prices of the best of all worlds”.
Nacho Rivera, photographer and teacher, adds: “Jaume Parera, with his photobook 0,99€, brings us closer to the life of street markets from an empathetic, creative and colourful point of view. 0,99€ is a necessary job, since, in these spaces sadly threatened by the new trends of rapid consumption, values as important as daily effort, companionship and humility are preserved. The 0,99€ photobook is of incalculable value”