Fernando Ugarte

Fernando has been interested in photography since he was a teenager. In the 1980s, he joined a team of young photographers in Mexico City, where he was born and grew up, who met every week to show each other their work and discuss techniques of darkroom and photography. At that time, he worked as an assistant to a commercial photographer and then as an assistant producer for a small company that filmed TV advertisements and documentaries. He began studying biology in 1987 and discovered that it was possible to use photography as a scientific tool for studies based on the identification of individual animals. Besides photography and biology, Fernando had a passion for travelling, which brought him to Northern Norway in 1990, where he worked in projects based on photo identification of killer whales and sperm whales. During his formative years, photography and filming were his main source of income. Fernando obtained an MSc degree from the University of Tromsø in 2001 on the behavior and social organization of killer whales in Northern Norway. He moved to Greenland in 2005, after a period of working in Denmark, Iceland, and Wales. He works at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, leading a team of scientists that advise the government about the sustainable use of wildlife. Fernando has never stopped taking pictures and his images are displayed in several fora related to Greenland, marine mammals, and the Arctic. Examples include the outreach by the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, the Greenland Research Council, the Arctic Hub, and the Commission of Arctic Flora and Fauna. Fernando joined the CNS network in 2024.