page_title: Ray McSavaney
section_title: Effective interpretation
hierarchical_section_title: Ray McSavaney / Main photographic projects / Pueblo southwest / Effective interpretation
caption_attribution_description: English: McSavaney always wanted to accentuate the dramatic settings of the Anasazi sites
context_page_description: Ray McSavaney 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 passed away 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.
context_section_description: With skills honed in the Tire Factory and Bunker Hill projects, McSavaney tackled the challenging Southwest pueblo ruins with as much of an eye to dramatizing as to portraying them.   By now, he was a proficient mature professional photographer, fully confident that he could capture any scene, regardless of whatever technical difficulties it may present.  His knowledge of materials, gained through rigorous testing and experimentation, allowed him to confidently tackle subjects that would "defeat a lesser craftsman".
  In addition to their luminance extremes, the ruins held dark regions of very flat contrast.  So, how to handle a subject, part of which is in deep shadow, part in bright sunlight, and in between dark patches of no contrast, regions that he somehow had to open?  No hay problema!  For most of his Southwest photographs, besides having to compress wide luminance ranges, he simultaneously had to drastically expand parts of many images — a very difficult technical exposure situation.
  Showing his versatility in control of materials, McSavaney printed many of his Southwest Anasazi ruins in high key.  That enabled him to achieve the most effective representation of the ancient ruined dwellings that had reposed for centuries in searing Southwest desert sunlight amid dramatic natural surroundings. Consistent through his work on the Southwest is an ability to capture the extraordinary juxtaposition of the ancient ruins with their dark-stained contorted rock surroundings. Many of his resulting photographs express the undoubted eye for drama and surprise in the enduring heritage of the Ancestral Puebloans.  Knowing Adam's admonition that what the artist creates is his message,McSavaney wanted the Anasazi to speak through his photographs as much as he did himself; that is, speak to the viewer.   He  had a unique ability to see the unified whole - the rock structures and colors, their multitude of forms and textures, the matrix as it were, into which the ancient builders had incorporated their own vision of the world.
  Having mastered the nuances of negative exposure and resultant printing, McSavaney departed from convention in the Southwest work to convey the eye for dramatic settings — some would say ‘chaotic’ — that their ancient dwellers undoubtedly possessed.  In many cases, their sites were almost always located amid surroundings of cliff overhangs with ominous descending streaks of black algal growth fused to the stone, unusual rock patterns, many affording unlimited vistas. Applying his ongoing quest for appropriate ‘context’, McSavaney photographed the contorted geology of their surroundings as much as the ruins themselves, uniting them into organic compositions. 
  Recognizing McSavaney's penchant for seeking order in chaos, a situation exemplified by many Southwest ruins and crowded Los Angeles street scenes, writer David Robertson again quotes him as stating  “Relationships between the objects, or people for that matter, in a photograph are maybe more important than the objects themselves”.  A statement with which the ancient Anasazi, with their keen eye for spectacular dwelling locations, most likely would agree, as would viewers of McSavaney's Broadway and Melrose Avenue series. (See the 'Ancient Ruin Sites' and 'People' in his web site.)
caption: Anasazi ruin, Cedar Mesa
  by Ray McSavaney, 1989
exif: {"Image Make": "Epson", "Image Model": "Expression11000", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "220", "Image YResolution": "220", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2019:02:21 10:55:56", "Image ExifOffset": "210", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2017:05:25 18:35:05", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "598", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "880"}