page_title: Ray McSavaney
section_title: Selection of subject
hierarchical_section_title: Ray McSavaney / Early life and education / Evolving photographic career / Selection of subject
caption_attribution_description: English: As a disciple of Ansel Adams, Ray was attracted to dramatic landscapes. The photograph appears as Plate 5 of his book, "Explorations".
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: At the beginning of his photography career, McSavaney worked only on subjects that strongly attracted him — not atypical of many photographers until they find their own unique ‘vision’. Conditioned by his years in urban planning, he continued his quest for ‘context’ and relationships for his photographic subjects. As noted, instead of isolated subjects he saw that their interrelationships produced stronger compositions.  His eight-year series on the “Walking Trees” at Yosemite National Park and the ever-changing graffiti of the Santa Ana Freeway Bridge, continued with some of White's themes.
  One theme permeating McSavaney's photography is lifelong concern for the environment, an attitude that he described as “… a journey through the natural and urban landscapes of the uncertain present".   So, recurring themes of how man shaped the environment, and conversely how the environment shaped man, are found in his photography, his writings, and workshop discussions. Readily apparent in his writings is the ongoing fascination with natural landscapes that he wanted to express through nuances of fine art landscape photography.  By his own admission, his favorite destination was Yosemite National Park. However, several years were to pass before he could photograph there to his satisfaction. 
  In formulating a photograph in his mind's eye, a process Ansel Adams termed ‘visualization’,McSavaney always looked to making a photograph with the strongest emotional appeal.  In his view, that meant harmonizing in the final work the subject's normally awkward brightness range and tonal values.  And for that, he had to perfect his increasing mastery of  photographic composition -  defined by Edward Weston as 'the strongest form of seeing'. That took much practice and intensive experimentation, especially since he was attracted to scenes of tonal extremes. In an apparent contradiction, he also was attracted to scenes that he could portray in a limited tonal range.  He termed that ‘high key’ in which the print tonal values fall on Zones VI – VIII in Adams’ terminology.
  Parenthetically, Adams' had words of caution, a caveat emptor, in use of the Zone system as the key to making a good photograph. Wisely stating that it was only a means to an end, a viewpoint that McSavaney quickly adopted, he advocated using it with awareness of its limitations and with its utility.  Adams illustrates this in an encounter with a quotidian photographer at Point Lobos stating that, after the Zone System is learned in detail, it becomes a way of thinking and of applying technical principles while visualizing a potential photograph.It has a basic simple mantra, however:  Expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights.
  While many take the view that a ‘good’ photograph (technically) has deep blacks and bright whites, ‘it ain’t necessarily so’.  Adams quotes an observation from his photographic assistant, John Sexton, slightly paraphrased as, 'many students believe that when they have a good black and a good white, then they have a good print.  Actually, at that point, they are only ready to begin to print the negative'.The point, of course, is that such a technically good photograph may not convey the mood or spirit of a scene that fine art photographers seek in their work.
caption: Yosemite valley winter landscape, 1973
  by Ray McSavaney
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