Ray McSavaney

Ray McSavaney died in West Los Angeles Veteran's Hospital in July 2014. A prolific photographer, the many categories of subjects that attracted his lens are identified in his website above. His extensive archives are now distributed among several institutions. Briefly, some prints and his work on florals are housed at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, also. His film archives, along with supporting materials, for his book 'Explorations' are at Center for Creative Photography. His B&W 4x5 negatives and a few prints of his Anasazi and Southwest subjects are at the J. Willard Marriott Library of the University of Utah; prints and some negatives of Los Angeles urban scenes are at the Richard J. Riordan Central Library in Los Angeles; his many color pencil sketches and a few prints are at the Portland Art Museum.

Inspecting the vast Bunker Hill construction site, McSavaney was struck by what he knew was its inevitable impending sterility. He had remembered its small Mom & Pop stores from his Los Angeles youth, its busy street scenes, the many varied activities of the old neighborhoods then being demolished. When Bunker Hill construction was completed in the early 1990s, the result was as he had foreseen — an area dominated by institutionalized cookie-cutter high-rise office buildings. However, while it was being built, Ray was attracted to the ongoing construction, the emerging new buildings, and the continual changes as the vast job progressed. He soon realized that accidental arrangements and juxtapositions among the construction tools and materials created unplanned but sometimes visually pleasing compositions. Multiple reflections, erratic lighting patterns, and unusual associations between near and far elements related in striking combinations, especially so at night when areas of light and shadow appeared in unexpected contexts. At such times the construction site, empty of workers and people, showed its stark reality.

The design motif of the Uniroyal Tire Factory would have done credit to a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood epic. With almost a third of a mile façade alongside a busy highway, crenellated and turreted like King Sargon's palace, it mirrored the flapper era national infatuation with exotic foreign and architectural motifs. Serving only as a decorative but secure wall shielding the huge tire factory, it projected the strength and endurance that its owners hoped existed in their products. Surviving until 1978, when its nearly half century of tire production ended, it stood abandoned until redevelopment began on the site in 1989. Living in a nearby city at the time, no doubt regularly going by the factory, McSavaney became intrigued and decided to ‘check it out’. He was among the many fine art photographers of the time who viewed remnants from earlier ages, such as the Tire Factory, the Ancient Puebloan ruins, and Los Angeles bridges, as ‘Forgotten Places’. They had an ongoing quest to photograph them before they disappeared forever.

While on a 1972 Sierra Club photography workshop he showed prints to the instructor, Bruce Barnbaum, who was very much impressed by their quality and originality. As ardent outdoorsmen, both soon bonded on subsequent Sierra Club trips. In the late 70s, becoming increasingly disgruntled with working for an impersonal corporation, McSavaney embarked on his own career in fine-art photography. The friendship and collaboration with Barnbaum soon led to formation of the noted fine-art photography program, the Owens Valley Photography Workshops (OVPW). The pair, later joined by John Sexton, previously one of Ansel Adams’ photography assistants, formed the OVPW staff. As program co-directors, the three organized and managed it until 1990 when they dissolved their partnership by mutual agreement. McSavaney soon established his own photography workshop program; Barnbaum and Sexton still have active fine-art workshop programs.

Born to suburban Los Angeles parents, McSavaney became aware of the visual arts — as did most kids of that era — from the comics, newspaper pictures, free merchandizing calendars, and posters of all kinds. He describes his boyish amazement in the late 1940s at the new phenomenon of a small grainy black & white TV program. Vacation trips with his parents introduced him to Western landscapes when he made amateur photographs with a consumer camera. Those trips generated a latent interest in landscape photography. Ray started college at USC but soon transferred to UCLA, from where he graduated in 1963, majoring in art with an emphasis in Design. Subject to the draft he enlisted in the US Army. Trained by the Army in photogrammetry and drafting, he worked on various military engineering projects. Leaving the Army after two years he returned to civilian life in Los Angeles. Putting his college studies and Army experience to use, he worked for Summa Corporation, a Howard Hughes Company, on various building and land development projects. On an art class with Robert Heinecken at UCLA, McSavaney got a brief introduction to photography but had only slight interest in his teacher's subjects from ‘found objects’, but he kept some of Heinecken's teachings in mind, and later was able to apply it in his own work. Enjoying the outdoors, Ray was much more attracted to natural landscapes. Sometime in the mid-60s those became his first serious art photography interest.

Ray McSavaney (December 18, 1938 – July 2, 2014) was an American fine-art photographer based in Los Angeles, California. Throughout a spartan but active life, practicing classical Western black and white fine art photography, he made enduring photographs of buildings, bridges, and street scenes of the vast city, ancient ruins and panoramic vistas of the Southwest, and studio setups with varied floral subjects. He died from lymphoma in Los Angeles Veteran's Hospital. Warm tributes to his life and career by some of his close friends and colleagues appear in a ‘celebration of life’ memorial recounted in ‘View Camera’ magazine.