Navarro was born Guillermo Jorge Navarro Solares in 1955 in Mexico City. He began taking still photographs at age 13 when took a photography workshop in middle school, and built his own darkroom. He worked for several years as a freelance photographer, working on everything from album covers to fashion photography. He attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he graduated with a degree in Sociology.
Career
Navarro began working in the film industry when his sister, a producer, hired him as on-set still and continuity photographer for one of her films. The experience triggered an interest in cinematography, and he began working as a camera assistant. Rather than working his way up through the Mexican film industry the traditional way, he instead moved to Paris where he became the apprentice of cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich. He worked for around 10 years before shooting his first feature.
Film
Navarro quickly formed a partnership with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, first by shooting commercials then later his directorial debutCronos, which won the prestigious Golden Ariel. Navarro moved to the United States in 1994, where he shot several films for director Robert Rodriguez and worked with high-profile directors Renny Harlin and Quentin Tarantino. He returned to Mexico in 2001 to shoot del Toro's The Devil's Backbone. Navarro's most acclaimed work to date came in 2006 when he shot del Toro's dark fantasy dramaPan's Labyrinth. Navarro and Del Toro had to work with a largely unfamiliar Spanish crew due to their usual crew's unavailability. Navarro shot the film using his personal Moviecam Compact and Arriflex 435 ES cameras and Zeiss Ultra Prime and Variable Prime lenses. He used three different Kodak film stocks: Vision2 200T 5217, Vision2 500T 5218, and Vision 250D 5246, depending on the lighting conditions under which a scene was filmed. Much the film was shot using day for night, underexposing the film three or four F stops. He purposefully kept lighting effects that could only be attained with sunlight, which jarred the image when it passed itself as night, creating an aura of experimentation. Because of the awkwardly-shaped spaces of the fantasy sets, Navarro had to be creative with his lighting, finding places to put his lamps that also didn't disrupt the image. A lot of light was strictly attained by bouncing it into the set. For certain scenes, the crew also drilled tiny holes into the walls of the set and placed little lights into the spaces. Navarro's work earned him an Academy Award, a Goya Award, an Ariel Award, and Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography.
His work often features very vivid blues and yellows which often take up most of the image, and the film's grain structure often switches between well-defined and sharp, and somewhat smoothed over or very fine.
