A year after the inauguration of the Phil Stern Pavilion inside the Museo Storico dello Sarco in Sicilia 1943 in Catania, the Oelle Foundation enriches the Pavilion’s photographic collection with a further eighteen images by Phil Stern, which are added to the seventy already permanently exhibited. The look beyond the war Phil Stern Photographer 1942-1943 is the title of the exhibition that presents unpublished images from Stern’s personal archive on the Second World War. An archive composed of approximately three thousand black and white photograms in 6x6 and 24x36 formats and a hundred slides on Kodak cardboard frames, today entrusted by the Stern family to the scholar Ezio Costanzo, who curated the exhibition, for study and conservation, and to the Oelle Mediterranean Ancient Foundation for the meticulous and long work of digitization. The exhibition brings together photographs taken by Phil Stern during Operation Torch, the campaign of occupation of North Africa by Allied troops between late 1942 and early 1943. Phil Stern took part in those events as a photographer for Darby’s Rangers, immortalising the highlights of the tough battles for the conquest of the port of Arzew, in Algeria, and the clashes at Kasserine Pass and El Guettar, in Tunisia.

Stern, at that time is 23 years old but already has the personality of a great photographer. He captures the bloody moments of battles but his gaze often moves beyond the war event, resting on visual elements that restore a narrative dimension in which the subjects, the light, the shapes give life to compositional profiles of high expressive power. In this exhibition, for the first time, his gaze beyond the war is presented to the public.

Some of the photographs exhibited will be enriched by an interactive sound installation created by the sound engineer Michele Spadaro. Installation that amplifies the visual effect of the images by mixing sounds and environmental effects of the time.