November 13, 2011
It is highly likely that a young Ned Scott created this self portrait during the year 1931, right after joining the Camera Club of New York. I do not yet know just how or under what circumstances my father joined that august group of photographers in 1930, but I do know that he used his Graflex 5 x 7 to shutter this image of himself. It was the same camera he used to shoot his 1931 photographic study of famed New Mexico church Ranchos Iglesia de Taos, a task which fell to many of the members of the Club. As a matter of fact, Paul Strand made his own study in the same year, one of several he was to do in the 1930’s. I look at this self portrait of my father these many years later, and he appears a stranger to me. When I was growing up as a young boy, I saw a very different man. What I remember most about him was a consuming warmth which radiated from him in a quiet and firm way. There was not a trace of the stern aloofness masking a touch of anger, or perhaps hauteur which is on view in this portrait. I never knew this man. Life changed him in a better way and he became more open to life, excited about the world around him, and eager to express himself creatively. Letters he was to write in 1935, just four years later, confirm that this change was firmly underway. And so by the beginning of his years in Hollywood as a still photographer, this new man’s photographic eye cast a more accepting, encompassing and respectful gaze on his subjects. At the time young Ned Scott snapped this photo of himself, he was seven years from creating the most iconic of John Wayne photos ( movie Stagecoach) and fifteen years from making the most famous of the photos of Rita Hayworth (Down to Earth). The young Ned Scott man in this photograph would never have had the subtlety to bring out the nuances of a refined Hollywood character actor or the graceful essence of a natural beauty.
A self portrait of Ned Scott as a young man of 25