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The beautiful photographs displayed on this website are a gift from an old friend of the firm, Kenneth F. Murphy. Ken, a native son of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, is the second child of eight, the first son of five. After being wiped out by Katrina in Bay Saint Louis, he currently lives with his wife of 26 years and two of his three children, Dylan (24), and Christina (18), in Kiln, MS. His other daughter Nicolette (20), and grandson Zayne (4 months) live in Waveland, MS. In 1971, at the ripe young age of 17, Ken entered the Army. His first assignment was to Korea, where he served as a 17 year old Tank Commander. In 1976, while serving as a Tank Commander in Germany he lost his right index finger to an explosive device while engaging in war games. He was then reassigned to a hobby shop at Fort Leonardwood, MO where he discovered photography. After leaving the Army in 1979, he traveled out West, living first in Tempe, AZ and then Tacoma, WA, where he sold cameras in a camera store, eventually coming back home in 1981 to open Dan B’s, a local bar on the beach front in Bay St. Louis, with his mom and brothers. He also got married to Tina Morreale. In 1983, he was tired of the bar business and decided to go to college, enrolling in the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, on a V.A. Vocational Rehabilitation program. He graduated in 1986 with a degree in Documentary & Editorial Photographic Illustration. After leaving RIT, he returned to the South, where he lived and worked in New Orleans as an assistant for other photographers. In 1990, Coast Magazine came on the scene, hiring Ken as their main photographer. Since then, he has worked on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as a commercial photographer. In 2001 he released his first book, “My South Coast Home, Photographs of the Mississippi Gulf Coast” as a way to use the thousands of photographs he had in his files. It has since become a local best seller and one of the only documents of how the Coast looked prior to Hurricane Katrina. In January 2007, after five years in the making, he released his second book, “Mississippi, Photographs by Ken Murphy”, which is an unprecedented look at the whole state. Square Books in Oxford, MS has called it “the best (coffee table) book ever done about the state of Mississippi”. Ken is now beginning work on his next book, “Mississippi, Volume II”, due for release in 2 – 3 years. You can purchase Ken’s books at your local bookstore or online at our favorite bookstore, Square Books. Mississippi (Hardcover (Cloth)) My South Coast Home (Hardcover (Cloth))
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