I have been a photographer since the middle of the Seventies. I was 15 years old when I boarded a ship to Hull, UK, with a Nikkormat and a 35 mm lens. You will find the stories from the early days traveling by train from Liverpool to Manchester. My love of the b/w will transpire traveling to Shanghai and Central Asia.

After my first Shanghai book was published in Paris in 2000, life in digital format including color photography has partially taken over my work. Still when moving to Chicago in August 2000, I shot the city in b/w (a body of work unpublished so far).

Over the years, whenever possible, b/w remains my true love as in the portfolio "The Real OG's and Their Friends", a set of portraits from December 2015 around the underworld in Baltimore. Shot around the funeral of a Godfather, it became a very interesting story.

Shanghai 1985-2019 is presented here in three chapters, by recording the life of the city over a period of 34 years, in 9 trips, my most complete body of work, made with the support of several grants from Columbia College Chicago.

Between 2011 and 2018, I decided to do a very long reportage in color while I was teaching photography at Loyola University and Columbia College Chicago. A new book "Chicago A Tale of Two Cities” was published in the Fall of 2021. It is a twin to the Shanghai book published in 2020.

In the Summer 2022, a 3rd book in 3 years was published “Wilson in Squares” a reportage made in Wilson, NC between 2015 and 2021. There are no people, just sights, walking in circle around my house for months and years.

Without the portraits of the famous, this website would not be complete, for 19 years I photographed 1300 studio portraits, from Liam Neeson to Halle Berry, from Russell Banks to Juliette Binoche, just to name a few. The book "Sixty Seconds" was published this July, with 340 portraits of celebrities, including forewords written by Laurent Abadjian, Gabriel Byrne and Gérard Lefort; Wide Angle Press, Wilson, NC, USA.

I am the Artistic Director of Eyes on Main Street, a Photography Festival in Wilson, NC. The 10th edition will launch in June 2024.

Enjoy the photography.

Jerome De Perlinghi

October 2023

Photo Jerome De Perlinghi by Peter Fitzpatrick, Pingyao 2018