Hourly Update

Photographer Ray Manley dies at Tucson home

Ray Manley, whose photographs of Arizona’s land and people shaped the state’s image and lured untold numbers of travelers to the Grand Canyon State, died Saturday at his Tucson home. He was 84. Manley’s color-drenched landscape portraits appeared at least yearly in Arizona Highways magazine from 1944 to 1988 and helped define the magazine’s photographic style, said Peter Ensenberger, the magazine’s director of photography. Manley promoted travel and tourism at the civic level as president of Tucson’s Tourism Bureau in the 1970s and as owner and operator of Ray Manley Tours, through which he and his wife, Ruth, led travelers throughout the Southwest and the world. Manley also “contributed as much any one individual to the promotion and exposure of Native American arts and crafts,” said Steve Getzwiller, who collaborated with Manley on the book, “The Fine Art of Navajo Weaving” Manley never could sit still, said his daughter Carolyn Robinson. Every summer, the day after school ended, the family would take off in a travel trailer and hit the West’s national parks and forests, she said. Robinson said her father died in his sleep early Saturday morning. He had been paralzyed on his right side and unable to speak since a stroke in 1997. She said the family piled the home “three deep with pictures of his world trips’' and her father never became angry or resentful, confined to the Foothills home he had sited, where a picture window framed the Catalinas.