'Great planes'

Jorge Molder began his career as a photographer with a solo exhibition in 1977 dedicated to Vilarinho das Furnas, in which the nostalgic tendency that would guide his work was already evident, underlined by the use of black and white and the light sfumatto that he would rarely abandon.
In 1980, he created An Exhibition in collaboration with the poets João Miguel Fernandes Jorge and Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, in which his interest in narrative insinuation and the cinematic bias of his photography began to take shape. Film noir, more specifically in the style of Dashiell Hammett, aesthetically marks the abandoned places that Molder selects as settings in these early works.
The adoption of the series as a structuring category accentuates this cinematographic character. Allied to an almost obsessive interest in the practice of self-portraiture, the series will function as the most omnipresent device for the production of meaning throughout his photographic career.
In Joseph Conrad (1990) or The Secret Agent (1991) we find a set of scenarios and props that evoke a narrative in suspense, like clues in a detective novel or a fantasy story whose development remains obscure. The self-portrait, although already present in 1981, will not acquire its current character until later. Being worked on in series, the self-portrait assumes a status of self-representation, in which the self is revealed and hidden through the assumption of another as the protagonist of the representation.
Between film noir and the Victorian novel, between the secret agent and Mister Hyde, the other is the one who has freed himself from the body to fully embrace his spectral condition, which is the condition of photography itself. As the latest testimony to this condition, we can see a series such as Nox (Venice Biennale 1999) in which the density of black threatens to finally subsume its characters.
In 1999 he represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale with the series Nox. Since then he has exhibited in the major national and international institutions and has been the subject of study by the greatest critics of contemporary photography.