Jorge Vera is a visual artist-photographer from Lima, Peru. He works with digital video, photography, and traditional analog, silver and non-silver processes.

Vera's body of work spans three decades and two continents. He is equally at home in Peru, and in the United States, where he has lived since 1979.

Vera's formal arts training began at the Peruvian Institute of Culture, where he studied sculpture and etching. He then was awarded a scholarship at,  Webster University, in St. Louis, Missouri, where he studied mass communications, film-video production and art, with an emphasis in 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.

From 1989-1992 Vera studies historic alternative silver and non-silver, salt-pigment, and carbon based photographic processes at Meramec College in St. Louis.

In 1993 Vera moves to Miami Beach, Florida, where he is awarded a five-year (1996-2001) artist-residency, and faculty position teaching photography at,  Art Center South Florida. There he began to focus on studio work, photographing nudes for his "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 US and European galleries, 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 featured in the traveling art show, "Contemporary Latin American Artists," curated by Dr. Carol Norman and funded 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 back to Peru to photograph porters in Cusco for his ongoing "Porters" series. Porters  documents Cusco's underclass, low-paid, short-lived porters, who transport huge loads on their backs for $2 to $5 a day, working for the multi-million dollar turist industry in the region.

Since the start of the millennium Vera's interests as a photographer and film producer have taken him to Italy, Spain, France and back to Cusco, and the snow-capped Cordillera Blanca (white mountain range) in Peru. 

In 2006, 2008 he travels 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 climatic event which has been triggered by global warming. In May 2009 he returns to Qoyllur Rit'i co-sponsored by, Hasselblad USA to test for the first time  the CVFII digital back for the V-system, in extremely hash altitude-low temperature conditions.

His most recent show in Lima was "Ojo de la Puerta" (Peephole), at PPPP Gallery (May 7 - June 7, 2008). PPPP, is the brainchild of 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's solo exhibit, "urbanismo- visions of self exile and urban life”, opened at the May Gallery, in  Webster University, August 27, 2010.  Urbanismo  is a subjective visual narrative of important impersonal moments in the mundane day-to-day American experience.  

His most recent solo show, "urbanismo", opens January 12, 2011 at Vertice Art Gallery in Lima, Peru.

Vera teaches photography at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, and Centro de la Imagen in Lima, Peru. He is a film producer for ARTE, Television, Strasbourg, and television producer in Peru for NBC-News, Today-Show and Dateline, New York. He is also a freelance photojournalist for the Miami Herald World Desk and, MSNBC. 

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.

(Polar Coordinates,  Versailles, (gelatin silver print triptych) 1996, J. Vera)