Lucas Murnaghan Water Photography

Name: Lucas Murnaghan Water Photography
Address: Toronto, ON, CA
Telephone: +14167228757
Price range: $$$

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Lucas Murnaghan Water Photography

1975–2021
MD, Fine Art Water Photographer & Co-Founder He has now traveled to four continents, shooting in major breaks around the globe.

Lucas Murnaghan is a Toronto-based photographer focusing on images that involve water and its surroundings. His early work focused primarily on surf and adventure photography, and he has always preferred to immerse himself in his environment leading to shooting from within the water. Surf brand sponsorships brought opportunities to shoot in-water photographic coverage for major international compe

titions, including the Rip Curl Pro Tofino and WSL Soup Bowl Pro. He has published his work in numerous publications and has staged two gallery shows. His love of photography has further evolved into fine art and editorial work in the underwater realm, and he has worked with several brands, subjects, and locations to create evocative and ethereal images. An accomplished triathlete and free diver himself, he works without additional SCUBA equipment, allowing him a deeper connection to his subject. This personal and organic approach allows for greater versatility in his shoots and a heightened level of intimacy to the finished product. Murnaghan brings a fresh eye to a challenging medium and takes his audience with him, below the surface, to see things from a novel perspective.

05/24/2026

Angie met Lucas during his surgical residency training in Vancouver. She watched his art career emerge from the beginning. When she told him that owning one of his pieces felt out of reach, he told her it would be waiting for her when she was ready.

Less than a year later, she acquired Step Into Liquid. She connected with him shortly before he passed. It is, she says, the most precious thing she owns.

Collectors worldwide live with Lucas's vision. Some of them were there while he was building it.

If a work has found you, send us a message.

https://www.lucasmurnaghan.com/works

05/17/2026

In 1951, Robert Henry Mizer founded Physique Pictorial and gave men an image of themselves the rest of the world refused to provide. He photographed the male form at a time when doing so carried real legal risk. He published anyway. That act of defiance became a cornerstone of q***r visual culture.

When the Mizer Foundation relaunched Physique Pictorial in 2017, they sought photographers who understood that tradition and could carry it forward. Lucas was among those invited.

His work now appears in Timeless: The New Men of Physique Pictorial, published by the Bob Mizer Museum and Photographic Archives. To be included in these pages, alongside photographers working in a lineage that stretches back more than seventy years, is something we do not take lightly. It is exactly the kind of company Lucas always kept.

You can order your copy of Timeless at: https://store.bobmizerfoundation.org/products/timeless

05/01/2026

Fall From Grace by Lucas Murnaghan is now open for auction through BOYS! BOYS! BOYS!, the leading global platform supporting q***r photographers.

Shot in South Beach in 2017, Fall From Grace captures Jean Arnas suspended mid-movement beneath the surface. The water is clear, the sandy bottom present, the light falling through from above and scattering across skin in a way that dissolves the boundary between body and environment. Arnas's pose sits somewhere between surrender and flight. Limbs arched, face turned toward the diffuse light above, it reads less as a held position than a moment caught in the middle of becoming something else. That ambiguity is what the image holds onto.

Lucas worked without SCUBA gear, which compressed the time available and pushed both photographer and subject into a more instinctive kind of collaboration. The stillness in the frame comes from that pressure, not despite it.

Water was central to everything Lucas made. Not as spectacle, but as something that strips away the performative and leaves what is actually there.

This is Edition 8 of 8 at 36" × 36", the final print at this size. It comes with a Certificate of Authenticity issued by the Lucas Murnaghan Water Photography Studio.

Bidding closes Sunday, May 10 4PM ET | 9PM UK | 10PM EU

Place your bid: https://boysboysboys.org/products/auction-fall-from-grace-2017-lucas-murnaghan

04/26/2026

Every collector has a reason. For Steve in Seattle, it goes back more than twenty years.
Lucas arrived in Vancouver in the early 2000s for his medical residency at UBC. Not long after, he found his way to a party in Seattle and met Steve. The two became friends quickly, the kind of friendship that starts fast and holds. Over the years, Steve hosted Lucas at his home and offered his pool for shoots. He was present for the work in a way most people never are.
One is the Loneliest Number was made in an Olympic pool in the American South. It now hangs in Steve's pool house in Seattle, and the print found its way to someone who understood, from the inside, what it takes to make work like this.
Steve described Lucas this way: "He brought fierce passion to everything he touched. His seriousness in one space was perfectly balanced by raucous joy in another. Watching him create was witnessing total immersion, not just in the water, but in the vulnerability, beauty, and intimacy he captured. My time with Lucas was not long, but it was luminous."
Collectors worldwide live with Lucas's vision. Some of them helped build it.
If a work has been on your mind, reply to this post or visit the link below. We are happy to talk.

lucasmurnaghan.com/collectors-club

04/15/2026

There are photographs that arrive quietly. This is one of them.

Lucas made this image of Christopher Pimpilli in Fire Island, and he called it Time Out. It is not dramatic in the way that some of his work is dramatic. There is no glacial water, no single held breath, no race against the cold. It is simply a man who has gone still underwater, suspended in his own thinking, held in a quality of light that Lucas always seemed to find even when it had no reason to be there.

Lucas had an instinct for the pause. He understood that the most revealing thing a subject could offer was not a gesture or a pose but the moment just before or just after, when the performance drops and something more honest comes through. He was patient enough to wait for it and skilled enough to recognise it when it arrived.

This image is that moment. Christopher is not doing anything. He is simply being somewhere, and Lucas was there to see it.

That quality of attention is what runs through all of Lucas's work. Seventy photographs, each one made with the same patience, the same respect for the subject, the same belief that water could hold a truth that air sometimes obscures.

He gathered those images into a book called Beneath the Surface, his debut, the first time the full body of work existed in one place, at the scale it deserved.
The second edition of that book is in its final chapter. A small number of copies remain. When they are gone, this edition closes.

If it has been on your mind, now is the time.

lucasmurnaghan.com/book/p/beneath-the-surface-photo-book-2nd-edition

04/05/2026

He named it after a line from one of the most powerful poems in the English language.

Dylan Thomas wrote "Do not go gentle into that good night" in 1947 as a desperate plea to his dying father. Not a poem about death, but about the refusal to surrender to it quietly. To resist. To go all the way in until there is nothing left to give. The line Lucas chose as the title of this image, "against the dying of the light," comes from the final stanza of that poem. He chose it because it was already a description of how he lived. He created with urgency and with everything he had, right until the very end. Those who knew him recognised this immediately.

This photograph was made in 2019, in the glacial waters of Lynn Canyon, British Columbia. The water that day was just above freezing. Lucas and his subject, Jared Murphy, had only minutes before the cold became dangerous to Jared's body. Look at the image long enough and you will see it. The cold is written on his skin, visible in every strand of hair. That is not an aesthetic choice. That is what this photograph cost to make.

Jared became one of Lucas's most important muses over the years they worked together. He was willing to go to places that most people would not consider: cold open water, remote coves, untouched underwater landscapes, all on a single held breath. The trust between them was total and it went both ways. It was the kind of collaboration that only becomes possible after years of going all the way in together, again and again, without hesitation.

Against the Dying of the Light was first shown at Lucas's debut exhibition, Beneath the Surface, in Toronto in 2019. It stopped people in the room that night. It has been stopping people ever since.

A limited number of editions of this work remain available. If it has found you, send us a message. We would love to tell you more.

03/23/2026

Five years ago today.

And somehow, his work continues to reach further than ever.

What Lucas created didn’t stay behind.
It found its way into people’s lives—into quiet spaces, into moments that ask you to pause and feel something.

That was always the point.

Not just to be seen.
But to stay with you.

His work now lives in homes across the world.
With collectors.
With people who connected to something deeper in what he created.

Thank you for continuing to carry that forward.

His legacy isn’t behind us.

It’s still unfolding.

01/17/2026

Now open for auction — Final Print (Edition 8 of 8)
Fraternal Relations (2018) by Lucas Murnaghan
In partnership with BOYS! BOYS! BOYS!

This auction marks the final opportunity to acquire Fraternal Relations from the original edition, released posthumously by the Estate of Lucas Murnaghan.

Created with identical twin brothers Calvin and Cory Boling, this photograph stands as one of Lucas’s most conceptually focused explorations of masculinity and identity. Rather than performance or dominance, masculinity here is internal—shaped through closeness, shared origin, and quiet distinction.

Submerged and aligned, the figures appear almost interchangeable. Yet subtle shifts in posture, breath, and presence resist resolution. Difference emerges through nuance. Strength is present, but deliberately contained. The tension lives in restraint.

Bidding closes Sunday, January 25
4PM ET | 9PM UK | 10PM EU

Place your bid at: https://boysboysboys.org/collections/artwork/products/auction-fraternal-relations-2018-lucas-murnaghan

11/28/2025

The book that revealed his world.
The closest Lucas ever came to a self-portrait.

When Lucas created Beneath the Surface, he poured every part of himself into it.
Every title written by hand.
Every photograph chosen with meticulous care.
Every story arc shaped with intention.

For six months, our kitchen table became our studio. Prints everywhere, edits everywhere, conversations late into the night. This wasn’t just a book—it was Lucas’s debut as an artist, his chance to show the world how he saw light, water, memory, q***rness, vulnerability, and becoming.

When the first edition launched, it sold out the same day we announced his passing.
Copies found their way into homes across five continents, carried there by people who saw some part of themselves in his work.

The second edition is nearly gone.
And this weekend, I want to make it easier for collectors, friends, and anyone who has been touched by Lucas’s work to bring this piece of his story home.

From now until December 1, when you order two copies, you’ll receive free worldwide shipping with code BFCM25.

One to live with.
And one to gift to someone who will feel seen, inspired, or moved by the world Lucas created.

Thank you for helping carry his voice forward.
Thank you for keeping his legacy alive.

Order through the link below.

https://www.lucasmurnaghan.com/book/p/beneath-the-surface-photo-book-2nd-edition

Address

Toronto, ON

Telephone

+14167228757

Website

http://www.lucasmurnaghan.com/

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