Biography provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
Born in northern Scotland, Murray received his M.D. from Edinburgh University in 1831. He then studied in Paris and toured the Continent. Murray accepted a medical posting with the East India Company and sailed to Calcutta in 1833. He remained in India for the next four decades, serving in a number of positions and leading the fight against cholera. Shortly after his promotion to surgeon in 1849, Murray took up amateur photography and soon formed a friendship with another doctor, John McCosh. By 1853 Murray was producing highly accomplished 13 x 17 inch waxed-paper negatives of Agra in great quantity. He began participating in the Photographic Society of Bengal in 1856. In 1857, during a visit to Britain, he took along a portfolio of four hundred of his negatives. By September of that year, the London publisher J. Hogarth was offering prints from them, individually or in sets of thirty. The introduction was written by his old friend J. Middleton, who also contributed at least one of the plates. On his return to India Murray experimented briefly with dry collodion and with stereo photography, but his favorite continued to be large waxed-paper negatives. His last exhibition at the Bengal society was in 1862, when it refused to give him a medal for his most recent calotypes. Although the society admitted that they were “very superior examples of the art,” it noted that “the process itself cannot compete with the results of more recent discoveries in clearness, sharpness, and artistic effect.” Murray ignored their rejection and continued to do some of his finest work. His last known photographs were taken in 1865, and he retired in 1870. Some of Murray’s photographic work was done on commission and is preserved in public archives. Fortunately, the family until recently retained an extensive group of his works. Now his glorious waxed-paper negatives are distributed widely in both private and public collections. Most appear to be as fresh as the day they were made, and collectively they serve as a fitting testimony not only to Murray’s passion and artistic talent but also to the suitability of the waxed-paper negative for use in India.