Phil Stern was born in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) on September 3, 1919 and at just 23 years old he chose to enter the midst of the Second World War to tell the story of the exploits of the American army and in particular of Colonel Darby's Rangers (where he enlisted as a volunteer) during Operation Torch in North Africa and Operation Husky in Sicily. Stern landed in Sicily, in Scoglitti, at dawn on July 10, 1943. He arrives in Sicily on the ship Susan B. Anthony, with the soldiers of the 45th US Division. He is a photographer for Stars and Stripes magazine. A few months earlier he had been slightly wounded in Africa but he quickly managed to overcome that bad moment. However, he immediately understood that photographing the war would not be easy at all, very different from photographing the murdered dead of New York for the "Police Gazette", the first magazine that at the end of the 1930s had assured him a monthly salary as a black photographer. Stern began his career at a very young age and at 17 he was already working in a photographic studio-laboratory in New York with very humble tasks. Having discovered the magic of photography, in the late 1930s he took photographs for the radical newspaper "Friday" which sent him to Hollywood for a story. He never returned to New York, seduced by the climate and atmosphere of the capital of cinema. He began publishing for "Life", "Collier's" and "Look", becoming the official photographer of President John Kennedy and a friend of James Dean, Frank Sinatra and Marylin Monroe. Seriously wounded in Sicily in July 1943, Stern was sent home on an American hospital ship. In his backpack he kept many rolls of film of those dramatic moments which for many years remained closed in a small wooden case. In July 2013, on the seventieth anniversary of the landing in Sicily and on the threshold of 94 years, Stern was in Sicily to inaugurate the new personal exhibition on the war on the island. A year later, on December 13, 2014, Phil Stern died in Barstow, California.