'Big Plans'.

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 made An Exhibition in collaboration with the poets João Miguel Fernandes Jorge and Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, in which his interest in narrative insinuation and the cinematographic slant of his photography began to take shape. The "film-noir", more specifically from the hand 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 fantastic tale whose development remains obscure. The self-portrait, although already present in 1981, would not acquire its current character until later. Being worked in series, the self-portrait assumes a statute of self-representation, in which the self is revealed and concealed 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, this being the condition of photography itself. As the ultimate testimony of this condition can be seen in 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 major national and international institutions and has been the subject of study of the major critics of contemporary photography.