Biography provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
A planter in Maldah, Bengal, Gray took up photography as an amateur sometime in the mid-1850s. In 1855 he gave a paper, “On a Simple Method of Manipulation in the Calotype Process,” to the Photographic Society of Bengal, which would be published in Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Gray was resourceful, working out a method of making silver nitrate by dissolving rupees in acid, and he exhibited photographs made by calotype and waxed paper as well as the air-pump process developed by John Stewart (1814 – 1887). As reported in the Journal of the Photographic Society of Bengal, in 1857 he exhibited “excellent views about the ruins of Gour [Gaur],” the ruined ancient Muslim city in West Bengal. That same year, Gray asked advice of the society concerning a new process that he intended to use to supply prints to Lady Charlotte Canning, a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria and the wife of the governor-general of India. He finally joined the Photographic Society of Bengal in 1862 and continued to photograph. In 1868 W. Le F. Robinson, the commissioner of the Rajshahi Division, recommended Gray as “a very good photographer” who would be willing to take additional photographs of Gaur.