About This Image

Signed lower right and titled lower left, on recto of the mount. Information on the artist, provenance, etc. is on a typed page and SF Museum of Art exhibition label on the back of the mount.

This photograph was shown in the San Francisco Women Artists' Photography Show at the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art in 1970. and later in the San Francisco Art Institute's Centennial Exhibition.

Joan Fell Murray was born on March 6, 1927, in Annapolis, Maryland, United States. She studied photography at California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, the San Francisco Art Institute, Ruth Bernhard Insight Studio, and at the University of California Extension.

Joan Murray was photography editor of Artweek starting in 1969 and an associate editor of American Photographer from 1978. She was also a critic for Popular Photography (1973-1976). A lecturer at the University of California Extension, Berkeley, starting in 1970, she later taught workshops with Wynn Bullock at the University's Santa Cruz Extension in 1974 and 1975. Joan Murray also taught at Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshop in 1974 and at San Francisco City College (1975-1976).

During the '70s and '80s Murray also taught photography at City College of San Francisco and UC Extension. In 1987, she embarked on a new phase of her career as manager of the ASUC Studio at UC Berkeley.

As a photographer, Joan Murray was particularly proud of her late 1960s series on the Black Panthers, her male nudes, and a series of portraits of California photographers that includes a signature image of Ruth Bernhard. Murray's work is featured in several photographic anthologies and is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, and the George Eastman House, among others.

Murray is mentioned in Naomi Rosenblum's A History of Women Photographers: "Joan Murray photographed the male figure as a way of demonstrating that, in Murray's words, 'men were as sensual to women, as women are to men.' Murray's 1969 exhibition in San Francisco, entitled Man, is thought to have been the first and largest show of such images by a woman."

Murray passed away on June 1, 2011 at the age of 84.

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