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.

[2] 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.

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.

Thinking he had only masterpieces, Ray was soon brought to reality by the quality of Adams’ images and those of the other workshop instructors — Roger Minick, Wynn Bullock, Paul Caponigro, and comparable masters.

Averring that he found the world difficult to understand “through isolated bits of information”, that is, a single photograph, he knew that he wanted to work with related subjects, ideally in a series.

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.

[16][17] Applying and sometimes extending Ansel's teachings in making an "expressive print", Ray honed and matured his artistic seeing and technical skills in two especially striking Los Angeles locations.

[20] With all that in mind in preparation for those difficult projects, McSavaney thoroughly experimented with several of Adams’ techniques for developing film exposed under extreme tonal ranges and lighting conditions.

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.

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’.

[22] Replete with dark corners, vast inaccessible coal-black interior spaces with barely visible detail, shafts of hazy light beaming through roof and wall breaks, the tire factory presented extremely difficult technical obstacles to making a satisfactory photograph.

In order to make effective photographs of the Bunker Hill constructions, McSavaney faced a new set of technical problems from working at night and in harsh lighting.

Eschewing use of floodlights or other artificial lighting, he forged ahead knowing he could take care of exposure problems by control of his materials — negatives and print paper.

He found that to his sensitivities, the Tire Factory created " a conflict between the grandeur and ugliness of the space"; whereas, the new Bunker Hill environment "is a sea of well-organized architecture and planning that ... becomes repetitious".

Without being especially conscious of it, Ray had the habits of the old time photographers (not to mention painters such as Van Gogh, Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe) who returned time and again to a favorite location: Ansel Adams to Yosemite, Edward Weston to Point Lobos, Wynn Bullock and Morley Baer to the Big Sur coastline, Paul Caponigro to the Reading Woods, Oliver Gagliani to Bodie and other western ghost towns.

Titled 'Early Morning, Merced River, Autumn' it clearly shows the advantages of familiarity with a subject; repetitive visits can pay off in unexpectedly different ways.

No doubt, both McSavaney and Sexton had an Adams' pithy observation in mind, "It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

[31] Less than a decade later, after honing his skills on the urban Uniroyal Tire Factory and Bunker Hills Redevelopment series, McSavaney began to show Yosemite in its more dramatic moods, one of which appears in the accompanying example.

[8] A prolific reader, with a library of well over 1000 books in his small and crowded artist's loft when he died, he was well versed in Muir's writings — doubly so as a lifelong Sierra Club member.

In addition to its unrivaled landscapes, included in his many subjects were the 3000-year old Great Gallery pictographs, — appropriately shown in the opening and closing scenes of the cult movie Koyaanisqatsi — the monumental Mesa Verde National Park and Cedar Mesa Anasazi ruins, now included in Bears Ears National Monument; the formation of which became an unfolding saga over many years and one that Ray followed with intense interest.

At every opportunity he made private trips to specific Southwest locations to photograph remote sites — the rugged Cedar Mesa canyons held special fascination for him.

[33] 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.

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.

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.

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.

)[8] Although maintaining his ongoing interests in Southwest ruins and landscape photography, Ray became increasingly attracted to photographing plucked flowers in contrived setups in his studio at The Brewery Art Colony for what he called his “Botanical Studies”.

One was direct portraits of the studio arrangements, bathed in luminous natural northern light with receding backgrounds that created the impression of magically floating in air.

[37] At times McSavaney combined his search for suitable floral materials in the downtown Los Angeles flower market with a photography workshop at his studio.

A frequent participant was writer John Nichols, another the Santa Fe artist Carol Rose Brown,[42] each a highly acclaimed practitioner of Southwestern themes.