Murnor Studio

Murnor Studio has been photographing South Florida families and businesses since 1925, when Harry Murray first opened the studio in Miami, and the business has stayed in the same family for three generations since. The studio moved to its current Andalusia Avenue location in Coral Gables in 1953, and it remains one of the very few local businesses of any kind, let alone a photography studio, that can trace an unbroken family history back nearly a century.

Today the studio is run by John Murray and his daughter Mary Ann Hull, continuing a family tradition that has quietly outlasted most of the commercial photography competition that has come and gone in Coral Gables since the 1950s. That kind of longevity matters in a field where technology and client expectations have changed dramatically, from studio portraiture in the mid twentieth century through the rise of digital photography and, more recently, corporate headshots and personal branding work. A studio that has adapted across all of those shifts while staying independently owned by the same family says something about how it has managed to stay relevant without losing what made it distinctive in the first place.

Murnor Studio’s Andalusia Avenue address puts it in a quieter, more residential feeling pocket of Coral Gables than the busier Ponce de Leon Boulevard gallery strip, which suits a photography studio that depends on scheduled sessions rather than walk in browsing. Clients tend to come specifically for family portraits, professional headshots, or business photography, often as returning customers or referrals built up over the studio’s long presence in the community, rather than discovering the studio by chance while out shopping.

That intergenerational continuity, three generations of the same family running the same Coral Gables studio since the Eisenhower era, is genuinely rare, and it gives Murnor Studio a kind of institutional trust that newer photography businesses simply cannot replicate. Longtime Coral Gables families sometimes have portraits taken at Murnor Studio across multiple generations of their own, creating a shared history between the studio and the families it serves that goes well beyond a single transaction.

For anyone in Coral Gables looking for a portrait or headshot photographer with deep local roots and a business built on family continuity rather than a franchise model, Murnor Studio represents one of the clearest examples in the city of what independent ownership sustained across a century can look like, a business that has watched Coral Gables itself grow up around it.