Pardo doesn’t quite remember when monkeys in particular became important to him. In fact, as a boy of eight years old, his first animal of fascination were snakes. His mother was a microbiologist who worked in a laboratory that produced antivenoms for snake bites, and she’d occasionally bring the young Pardo along for a visit. Seeing the snakes kept at the lab, he was enthralled. “I loved it,” he recalls fondly. “I think my love for nature comes from that interaction with snakes and through my mom.”
Coincidentally, snakes were also some of his first serious photographs. Taking his first photography classes in Montreal during a gap year after high school, Pardo decided to buy a pet python on a whim — they were legal, after all.
“So I had a snake in my apartment, and I was taking photo classes, so I started photographing the snake,” Pardo remembers. “It was just basic photography, through the terrarium and whatnot, but I remember those images becoming cool.”
He went on to study biology at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and completed his thesis in the Orinoco region, focusing on bird-fruit interactions and evolution. There, he had his first face-to-face encounter with a group of howler monkeys. Luckily, he had his camera with him. “Those photos that I took that day,” he shakes his head. “I was like, ‘Wow, seeing monkeys up close is important.’ It’s something that really shakes you.”
Shortly after this trip, perhaps affected by those perspective-shifting howler monkey photos, Pardo decided to change course and pursue storytelling. “Maybe spending that time in the jungle, living with people from local communities, it made me realize that I wanted to go more down the communication side of science,” he says, compared to an academic route in which he’d be in dialogue predominantly with scholarly peers.
“I love so many things about biology and science, and I love photography. I think there’s a need to bridge two worlds, and maybe media will be the tool that I use to bridge those worlds.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-01 02:00:00
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