Miguel Naranjo

The sea

He was born and raised in Puerto Vallarta. Before anything else he considers himself a photographer who admires nature: the ocean got to him early, and it is still where most of his work starts.

Looking first

Photography began with looking. Before he owned a camera he would stop to watch the water change color through the day. He came up through graphic design, and it shows in how he approaches an image: what it is for, and what it has to solve.

At one point he stepped back and took a sabbatical year to get better. He returned with more craft and more clarity.

The official image bank

At the end of 2013 he joined the Puerto Vallarta Tourism Board. In 2015 they commissioned him to build the city's official image bank, which went on to promote Puerto Vallarta at home and abroad. The photographs were shown at tourism fairs and trade shows in several countries, and a couple of them ran in the Mexico Tourism Board's Vallarta · Nayarit campaign.

As a photographer born here in Puerto Vallarta, I always felt a mission of my own: to make images of this place so people could see what it has.

Playa Escondida

Before the Marietas Islands were widely known, one short session at Playa Escondida produced about four photographs that spread across the internet. Editors in China and Japan wrote to him, and National Geographic, Lonely Planet and Larousse published the images.

The air

Drones changed the way he sees. That curiosity became TreeMedia in 2018, the aerial photography and video studio he runs with Javi Robles for architecture, engineering and construction.

What he has built for others

In late 2009 he and Shanti Gilbert started PhotoWalk Puerto Vallarta. For eight years it brought the Scott Kelby, Google+ and 500px photowalks to the city, put on group shows and drew together the Caza Atardeceres, the local sunset chasers. Between 2012 and 2013 he taught technique and judgment through Soy Foto.

He likes photography to be useful to someone else: to his city, to other photographers, to the businesses around him.

Work today

He photographs architecture, hotels, food and landscape, and over the last few years has built a body of work in medical photography: hospitals, operating rooms and specialized facilities. He has worked with Hospitales CMQ, Grupo Vidanta, WestJet, Lufthansa, Avis México and Puerto Vallarta's tourism board, among others, and his photographs have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Lonely Planet and Larousse.

Alongside that he keeps Diario con Cámara, his personal street photography project, and Las Puertas del Puerto, a running record of the doors, façades and small details of the city.