page_title: Ray McSavaney
section_title: Urban subjects
hierarchical_section_title: Ray McSavaney / Main photographic projects / Urban subjects
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo illustrates McSavaney's control of subject wide tonal ranges
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: Two of McSavaney's early photography series were what he termed "The Tire Factory" and "The Bunker Hill Project".  In each of these subjects he was faced with ranges of brightness, tonalities, and contrasts that he had not previously encountered.
  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.
  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.
caption: Abandoned tire factory
  by Ray McSavaney, 1980
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