Jorge Molder began his career as a photographer in 1977, with a solo exhibition dedicated to Vilarinho das Furnas, presenting an early glimpse into the nostalgic inclination that would guide his work, and underlined by using black and white, and the slight sfumato, which he would rarely abandon.
In 1980, Molder collaborated with poets João Miguel Fernandes Jorge and Joaquim Manuel Magalhães for an exhibition where he started to show his interest in narrative innuendos and the cinematographic inclination of this photography work. The film noir subgenre, particularly by Dashiell Hammett, illustrates, aesthetics-wise, the abandoned places Molder selected as settings for his early works.
This cinematographic nature is accentuated by using the series format as a structuring category. The series has, combined with his bordering-on obsessive interest in the self-portraiture practice, worked as a more omnipresent device in the production of meaning throughout his photographic journey.
One can find a set of sceneries and props that evoke a suspended narrative, as if clues in a crime novel or fairy tale, whose plot remains dim, in the photographic series Joseph Conrad (1990) or The Secret Agent (1991).
Despite its presence as early as 1981, self-portraiture only took on its current nature later. It assumes a self-representation status, in which, by being worked on in a series, the self reveals and conceals itself through the assumption of another as the protagonist of the representation.
Between film noir and Victorian novels, between the secret agent and Mr. Hyde, the other is who freed themselves from the body to fully embrace their spectral condition, as this is the condition of photography itself. An example is the series Nox (La Biennale di Venezia, 1999), where the density of darkness ultimately threatens to subsume his characters.
Ever since then, Jorge Molder has held exhibitions at major national and international institutions and has been studied by some of the greatest contemporary photography critics.
