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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Billy Name, the resident photographer of the Factory for seven years, is trying to retrieve his missing archive of negatives. “My negatives are in ghost land, man,” Mr. Name said.

Billy Name, who lives in a neatly kept apartment in a run-down house near the train station here, has never had to make that case for himself because his photographs have always done it for him. For seven years, beginning in late 1963, when Warhol gave him a 35-millimeter Honeywell Pentax camera, Mr. Name was the resident photographer of the Factory, capturing the perpetual swirl of superstars, celebrities and hangers-on.

He left in 1970, traumatized by the shooting of Warhol by Valerie Solanas two years earlier and disillusioned by the increasingly businesslike direction of Warhol’s career. And in the years since, Mr. Name’s income, such as it is — he describes himself as an anarchic Buddhist who has never cared much about money — has mostly come from magazine editors, curators, filmmakers and others who pay him for the use of his 1960s images, produced from several thousand negatives. The pictures provide rare documentation of nearly every aspect of Warhol’s world at the so-called Silver Factory on East 47th Street in Manhattan and at the studio’s later incarnation near Union Square.

But sometime in the last two years, Mr. Name’s archive of negatives went missing. Mr. Name left it in the care of a photography agent, Kevin Kushel, a former director of The Associated Press’s photo archive who went on to form his own stock-photography company, and whom Mr. Name said he had not been able to contact for months. The disappearance of the negatives has alarmed not just Mr. Name and his circle of friends and supporters but also scholars, who describe the images as an important historical record of a pivotal time in art history.

“His documentation of that era is really irreplaceable,” said Callie Angell, the adjunct curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Andy Warhol Film Project. “There were really only four photographers around the Factory for any length of time in the 1960s, and Billy Name was the only one of them who lived there. His pictures were Warhol’s press photos. They were his chosen representation of his work.”

In 2006 Ms. Angell completed the first volume of the catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s films, a book that includes many of Mr. Name’s pictures. She is now at work on the second volume, and she said that she worried that she would be unable to find crucial photographs that she needed for it.

Mr. Name (who was born William Linich) grew up in Poughkeepsie and in the 1950s moved to New York City, where he became a theatrical lighting designer and had a brief romantic relationship with Warhol, before moving into the Factory. In an interview at his home, he described a chaotic chain of events that leaves many questions about what has become of his negatives, which he kept with him for years in several ring-binder notebooks.

He said that Mr. Kushel, who became his agent more than a decade ago — though the two never had a written contract — took the negatives in several batches from Poughkeepsie to his own apartment in Manhattan, to scan them. For many years, Mr. Kushel struck agreements with magazines, publishers and others to provide images when they were requested, and Mr. Name said he was happy with his work, trusted him and felt that the negatives were in good hands.

But in 2007 Mr. Kushel left New York and moved to Palm Springs, Calif., and later to Hawaii, where he lives now. After months of what Mr. Name said was erratic behavior that included Mr. Kushel’s not responding to requests for images, Mr. Name severed their relationship and asked for his negatives back. But none have been returned.

“I never really had an agent before Kevin and I was not well during much of the time period when all this was happening,” said Mr. Name, 69, who has diabetes and arthritis. “And I didn’t know — I still don’t know — how to deal with something like this.”