Frances Murray and Harold Jones: Simpatico

This exhibition debuts a significant gift of photographs by Frances Murray and Harold Jones to the Tucson Museum of Art. Murray and Jones were among the new wave of photographers active in Tucson in the 1970s. Together, they contributed greatly to the photographic arts in the region. Harold Jones and Frances Murray lived for many years in Tucson before relocating to the Seattle area in 2019.​

Frances Murray (b. 1947, Ireland) is an award-winning fine art photographer who captures surreal still lifes, sensual figures bathed in natural light, and elegant botanical studies in black and white and in color. Her work is included in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Murray began to make photographs in 1975, newly settled in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband, Harold Jones.

Harold Jones (b. 1940) is the founding director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography (1975) and established the photography program at the University of Arizona where he taught for the next thirty years. Known as an artist, educator, curator, and arts administrator, he graduated from the Maryland Institute with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Photography and from the University of New Mexico with a Master of Fine Arts in history and photography. In 1971, he worked as an assistant curator at the George Eastman House and became the first director of LIGHT Gallery in New York City, the first gallery to exclusively represent contemporary photographers. Jones’s photographs are in-depth studies of the mundane from unusual vantage points or unexpected cropping, and many are hand colored to create what he calls “photodrawings.”

Credit: Overview from museum website