"At Ease"

Frank Errigo (b. 1920)
"At Ease." Camp Pendleton, California
Original on 4x5 format Kodachrome film, 1943
Ilfochrome print made October 2002
Prints & Photographs Division
Gift of The Errigo Archive, LLC (243.4)
[ Digital ID# ppmsca-05606 ]

New technologies can provide compelling prints of World War II color photographs. As a sergeant in the Army Signal Corps, Frank Errigo produced this image for military recruiting and training purposes. He obtained copyright to the Kodachromes not retained by the military and published them during the war in nearly sixty magazines and the color supplements of Sunday newspapers including The New York Herald Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Chicago Daily Tribune. Here Errigo posed two actors as soldiers in a bomb storage facility at Camp Pendleton, California, admiring a portrait of a young woman while a pinup of Susan Hayward hangs nearby.