Photographer Ned Scott worked in elite circles.

He shot stills on the set of the classic 1939 John Ford western Stagecoach. He worked with Orson Welles and photographed Ingrid Bergman, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Katharine Hepburn and Rita Hayworth.

The still photographs he took on the set of the 1934 Mexican docudrama The Wave were called "classics" by the film's renowned director, Fred Zinnemann, who later won "Best Director" Oscars for From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons.

Scott worked with and learned from the most influential American photographers of the 20th century: Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, among others. In the 1920s and '30s, he was a member of the Camera Club of New York, the era's center of the "photography as art" movement.

Yet, for almost five decades most of the work of this accomplished photographer sat unknown in boxes. The story of Ned Scott, who died in the mid-1960s, and his photos remained a mystery until the 1990s.

After spending a decade researching the photographs and his father's life (with assistance from Louisville photographer and art historian Randall Elkins) Norm Scott has donated about a third of the collection to the U of L Photographic Archives.

Bill Carner, imaging services manager in Special Collections calls the acquisition "one of the most important collections" in the archive.

It's like finding a treasure we didn't even know was there," he says. "This collection is of great aesthetic and historic significance.

"It's a perfect fit in that it expands our holdings in the mid-20th century American photography, and this is strong work from that period," Carner adds.

The collection of 268 images includes original prints of scenes shot in Mexico, the American West and Hollywood, as well as personal correspondence between Scott and famous photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand.

More material, including original negatives, will be acquired in coming months.

Cataloging and archiving the material could take more than a year. The work may be exhibited by late 2003 or early 2004, Carner says.

Norm Scott says he selected U of L for the donation because of the encouragement and support photo archives' staff provided him and his colleague Elkins during research.

Scott moved to Louisville in the 1980s and inherited his father's photos and letters after the death of his mother, Gwladys, in 1984.

Although he contacted various archives and made fledgling efforts to research the collection in the 1980s, Scott had no real concept of its value and importance and the material sat untouched in boxes until the early 1990s.

Then one day, Scott and his son Evan, who were avid stamp collectors, were looking for vintage airmail stamps on his father's letters. Scott began reading a 1935 letter from his father to his mother, who was then a screenwriter at MGM.

In the letter, Ned Scott humorously boasted that his photographs of Katharine Hepburn looked more like the star than a bust made from them. Norm Scott then found a folder of negatives marked "Hepburn heads."

"I began to realize that my father's work was more significant than I had ever imagined or had been led to believe," Scott says.

Soon thereafter, Scott established the Ned Scott Archive and housed it for several years on Third Street in Louisville.

Scott recently moved to Hawaii and closed the Louisville location. He now keeps the archive material in several locations and exhibits photos and sells prints from the collection.

The Man Who Wasn't There

An archive requires extensive historical research to properly date materials and put them in historical context. While researching his father's work, Scott learned about a man who had largely been an enigma to him.

For reasons not fully known, Scott abandoned photography in 1948 to start an architectural design magazine. Scott died in 1964 at age 57, and his last years are not ones that his son remembers fondly.

Norm Scott mostly recalls a man who didn't talk about his work and who drank too much. But that's not a portrait of Ned Scott that Norm wants to dwell on.

When I looked at these photos I saw a man who was inspired and vibrant and at his best. It made me proud of him and gave me a legacy to pass on to my own son and to future generations," he says.

Scott believes his father's decline as an artist and slide into alcoholism may have happened in the early 1940s when he moved from Santa Monica, Calif., to La Canada, Calif., and began doing more commercial and less artistic photographic work.

"Here he was, at the cutting edge of photography in the United States, mixing in social circles with the cream of the crop in the art and entertainment world in the 1930s and 1940s." In Santa Monica in the 1930s, Scott lived across the street from Edward Weston and was shooting western vistas that have been compared to the work of Ansel Adams.

"And then he moves to the hills above Pasadena and has to work with commercial clients only interested in functional kinds of work," Norm Scott continues. "I think the artist in him couldn't take that. He was separated from the exciting world he had worked in before."

Elkins, who attended U of L as a photography major from 1983 to 1987, was a commercial photographer for 20 years. He quit to devote his energies to directing the ventures of the Ned Scott Archive. He now lives in Sacramento, Calif.

Elkins believes the grind of working in Hollywood in the 1940s may have led to Scott's decision to abandon photography.

"Ned Scott could emulate anyone's portrait style," Elkins notes.

His images have been compared to those of the legendary Hollywood portrait photographer George Hurrell. Scott's work won awards and was published in Life magazine.

Yet Elkins believes that Scott may have found the sameness of the work unrewarding.

"I can identify with Ned Scott and why he became burned out," he says. "I've shot the mayor, Muhammad Ali, Coke cans, cars and CEOsÑand after awhile it all looks the same."

Norm Scott, who made his living in real estate, is a different man than his father. He says he's more practical and not artistic. Researching his father's life and work, he says, has filled him with pride and provided him a new understanding of a man he never really knew while he lived.

"My father's life is still something of a mystery, but we've been able to get a lot closer to it," Scott says. "This donation is a good representation of the diverse nature of his work."