Murray is not a professional photographer in the credentialed-and-commissioned sense. He's a resident who started shooting his neighborhood in film, the kind of slow, committed practice that forces you to decide what's worth the frame before you press the shutter. The results, which he shares through social media and community channels, have accumulated into something closer to an archive than a portfolio: produce stands with their hand-lettered signs, the particular way afternoon light lands on a pastel facade on Persia Avenue, kids in school uniforms walking past a mural that's been repainted twice since he started.

The Excelsior is one of those neighborhoods that gets described, usually by people who don't live there, as a place that hasn't changed yet — which is both a backhanded compliment and demonstrably wrong. Murray's photos, taken together, show a neighborhood in constant small motion: a shuttered restaurant becomes a new one, a vacant lot gets a community garden and then loses it, a corner that looked one way in 2018 looks different now. None of it dramatic enough to make the news wire, all of it legible in the cumulative record.

What distinguishes his work from the typical neighborhood-pride Instagram account is the patience. Film slows you down. You notice the third time you've walked past something before you decide it's worth keeping. That deliberateness shows in what he chooses — not spectacle, not ruin, but the ordinary mid-scene of a neighborhood doing what neighborhoods do.

Murray lives on the same streets he photographs, which is not a minor detail. The person at the produce stand knows him. The light he's catching on Persia at 4pm is the same light he drove home in.

Anyone walking that stretch tomorrow would see exactly what he's been shooting: the signage, the storefronts, the particular density of a block that has not yet decided what it's becoming.