About Devin

Devin Murphy is a photographer born and raised in Catawba County, North Carolina, currently residing and working across the region.

At 18, he boarded a Greyhound bus from Asheville to San Francisco. Over the course of three days, watching the country unfold mile by mile, his sense of the world widened in a way that never left him. He spent the following year moving along the California coast, where he encountered a retrospective exhibition by Yoko Ono that quietly but permanently shifted his understanding of what art could be.

At the time, Murphy was not yet making photographs. Instead, he was writing—drawn to poetry as a way of holding onto moments of scale, distance, and feeling. He read wherever he could, chasing open mics and small rooms, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

Returning to the Carolinas, he encountered the work of Carl Sandburg at his home in Flat Rock, an experience that deepened his connection to language and place. Between these moments, a philosophy began to take shape—one rooted in intuition rather than instruction, in the belief that meaningful work exists beyond fixed rules.

Photography came later, but naturally. Today, Murphy’s practice moves between commissioned work and fine art, with an emphasis on image-making that carries the same sense of quiet observation and openness that first drew him to poetry.