The images taken by Stern during the Second World War (in North Africa and Sicily) contain a very personal page of history of the then young photographer of Stars & Stripe, who enlisted as a volunteer in the Rangers of Colonel William Orlando Darby. They are photographs full of pathos and tell not only the military life of those days (the landing, the battle actions, the movements of the troops, the occupation of the island cities) but also the social life, the people of the island in the many countries crossed by the American soldiers, the fleeting glances of the women, the incredulity of the elderly, the carefreeness of the children despite wearing the clothes of poverty and hardship. The cultural value of the exhibition is twofold: artistic and historical. And this is because in the photographs of Phil Stern there is not only the document, or the representation of what happened in those moments; there is also the gaze, discreet, towards everything that revolves around those moments of death. And so history becomes art in Stern's photographs and even military vehicles, weapons, the sea crowded with threatening boats, the tanks that plough through the sunny Sicilian hinterland become extraordinary compositional objects. He recounts the war event, documents history but his gaze goes beyond history, managing to perceive, in that tragic world that surrounds him, the signs of poetry that he then gives back to us in images full of rare humanity and beauty.