Hiro Narita

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Hiro Narita, a Japanese American cinematographer, was born June 26, 1941 in Seoul, South Korea in the clinic owned by his physician father ^{[verification needed]}.

In 1945, along with his parents, four siblings and grandmother ^{[verification needed]}, Narita moved to Japan where he spent his childhood. Following his father's early death and his mother's remarriage ^{[verification needed]}, he immigrated in 1957 to Honolulu, Hawaii where he graduated from Kaimuki High School. He went on to the San Francisco Art Institute from which he received a BFA in Graphic Design in 1964. He quickly landed a good position at a prominent local design firm, but the job lasted barely six months before he was drafted into the U.S. Army. For two years, he served as a designer and photographer at the Pentagon.

An avid movie fan since childhood, Narita decided to go into filmmaking rather than go back into graphic design upon his return to San Francisco in the mid-sixties. After an assistance to John Korty and Victor J. Kemper on the Michael Ritchie movie The Candidate (with Robert Redford) in 1971 he photographed the television movie Farewell to Manzanar in 1975, for which he received an Emmy Award nomination. In 1976 he was one of the camera operators on Martin Scorsese's documentary The Last Waltz about the last concert of The Band. Later he worked on projects like Apocalypse Now, More American Graffiti, and the Neil Young documentary Rust Never Sleeps. For his cinematography on the movie Never Cry Wolf he won the Boston Society of Film Critics Award and the National Society of Film Critics Award in 1983. In 1989 he photographed the Visual Effects in the Steven Spielberg film Always. In the following years he was the Director of Photography on successful films like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and The Rocketeer.

Narita served as Director of Photography on the 1997 Live Action Short Film Academy Award wining Visas and Virtue. He also directed the 1997 hour-long documentary film, Isamu Noguchi: Stones and Paper.