Quintus Fernando was born in Colombo, Ceylon, in 1926. He was the eldest of five children of a tea and rubber plantation owner. His mother raised the family before taking a law degree and practising as the first female lawyer at the Hulftdorp Courts in Colombo.
Educated at St. Thomas’ College, Colombo, he entered the University of Ceylon, Colombo, on a mathematics scholarship before turning to chemistry, graduating in 1949. He then travelled to the United States and completed a PhD in chemistry at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1953.
He returned briefly to teach at the University of Colombo before departing again for the United States in 1957, where he took up a post as Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. After a brief interval he moved to the University of Arizona, where he remained for forty years. With Professor Henry Freiser he founded the university’s Analytical Chemistry Division, long regarded by the National Science Foundation as one of the premier centres for the discipline in the United States. He published several hundred research papers and authored or co-authored books and chapters in authoritative texts.
Fernando’s photographic practice began in his student years and continued until his emigration in 1957, working with both a Mamiyaflex twin-lens camera and 35 mm cameras. He occasionally travelled with Nihal Fernando, who later became one of Sri Lanka’s preeminent wildlife photographers and environmental activists. He also made excursions with Eric Swan, who died on a wildlife photography expedition in 1951. Fernando was a member of the Photographic Society of Ceylon until his departure in 1957, and his prints show a clear command of advanced darkroom technique, which he used to develop a style distinctly his own.
Hundreds of prints, negatives and slides spanning the late 1940s to the 1990s were rediscovered and catalogued by his son, Barry Fernando MD. The archive led to the Phoenix Art Museum exhibition Legacy of Ceylon: Art and Photography of Sri Lanka and to the 2021 publication Mist and Rain: A Photographic Journey of Ceylon, with an introduction by John Guy. The Ceylon photographs stand as a rare personal record of the island’s transition from 135 years of colonial rule to independence.