Jorge Vera is a visual artist-photographer from Lima, Peru.  He works in digital and traditional black & white and color analog photography, and alternative chemical processes. He works with mutiple image making techniques and wide-ranging, sometimes provocative, subject matter.

Vera's photography career spans three decades and two continents. He is equally at home in Peru, where he spent the first twenty years of his life, and in the United States, where he ived for more than twenty-five years before returning to his hometown of Lima in 2007.

Vera's formal arts training began at the Peruvian Institue of Culture, in Lima, where he took classes in sculpture and etching. He then was awarded a scholarship to Webster University, in St. Louis, Missouri, where he studied mass communications and art, with an emphasis on photography with Susan Hacker Stang. It was as an undergraduate at Webster University that Vera began photographing his iconic images of the American Midwest, photos of vastness, isolation and occasional humor.  Vera's first solo show, of black and white images taken in Missouri and Arkansas, debuted at the aptly named Mark Twain Bank, in St. Louis, in 1989.

In 1993 Vera moves to Miami Beach, Florida, where he is selected as artist-in-residence, and photography teacher (1996-2001) at, Art Center South Florida, in South Beach. There he began to focus on studio work, photographing nudes ("Fertiility Series") and building light boxes with transparency litho film  for the "fish out of water-or-gone fishing" , series  creating photo montages and mixed media collages. During this period Vera's work attracts the attention of galerists, curators and collectors and was exhibited in dozens of galleries and museums throughout Florida and the United States. Exhibit venues included the Bass Museum of Art (Miami Beach), the Florida State capitol in Tallahassee, Indiana State University, West Tennessee Cultural Arts Center, West Virginia University, the Fort Lauderdale Art Museum, the Orlando Museum of Art, and Caelum Gallery in Chelsea, New York.  While in Florida  he was represented by the Daniel Azoulay Gallery in Miami's Design District.

Vera's work also was represented in the traveling art show, "Contemporary Latin American Artists," curated by art historian Carol Norman. Sponsored by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council, the widely acclaimed show traveled for 18 months to 16 museums and galleries throughout the Midwest and southeastern United States. 

In the mid 1990s, Vera began traveling to Peru to photograph porters in Cusco for his ongoing "Porters" series. These documentary-style photographs reveal the daily struggles of Cusco's underclass of low-paid, short-lived porters, who transport huge loads on their backs for $1 to $3 a day.  In 1999 he assisted the newly formed Cusco porters union by taking portraits of members for their historic first ID badges.

Since the millenium, Vera's interests as a photographer have taken him to Italy, Spain , France and back to Peru. In 2006, 2008 and 2009 he traves to the 16,000-foot-high peaks of Mount Ausangate, in the southern Andes, to photograph the vanishing rituals of Qoyllur Rit'i ("Lord of the Snow Star"), the largest indigenous religious pilgrimage in the Western Hemisphere; this ancient ice-gathering pilgrimage is threatened with extinction due to the rapid melting of the sacred Qolquepunku glacier, a tragic event which has been triggered by global warming.

Vera's most recent show in Lima is "Ojo de la Puerta" (Peephole), at PPPP Gallery (May 7 - June 7, 2008). PPPP ("Productos Peruanos Para Pensar") is the brainchild of the Peruvian-Italian artist Alberto Casari, a painter and sculptor in the Duchamps tradition whose works probe the arbitrary boundaries between Art and Product, Self and Other.

Vera plans a retrospective show at  May Gallery de Webster University,   September, 2010.

Visit Jorge's  online gallery at photo.net:  http://www.photo.net/photos/JorgeVera/

Jorge Vera es un fotógrafo-arista visual nacido en Lima, Perú, que trabaja con procesos digitales y analogos, impresiónes de emulsion de plata y otros tipos de procesos fotograficos y quimicos altenativos.  El crea imagenes con multiples tecnicas plasticas y su obra es conocida por su contenido a veces provocativo.