In 1949, four years before LIFE magazine published its first 35mm color essay, Frank Errigo was shooting color covers for the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Roto with his 8x10 view camera.

Already on his resume were seven years of large format color, including three years as Harry S. Truman's staff photographer. The same man would later reinvent the art of commercial room set photography, where hand-tinted black and white was still being used when he began a forty-year association with industrial giant Armstrong in 1952.

But it was as a twenty-one year old that Errigo set forth to capture his generation on film as no other photographer did -- in spectacular large format color. In four brilliant years from 1941-1945, throughout the United States, Africa and Italy, Frank Errigo produced an enduring collection of portraiture which are being heralded as the most vivid images of the 1940s ever created.

Born to immigrant Italians in 1920 in Curwensville, PA, Errigo was the youngest boy in a family of nine children. He was thunderstruck as an adolescent by images of the 1889 Johnstown Flood, and from the age of thirteen he dedicated himself to photojournalism. He worked two jobs through the Great Depression, until in 1936 he purchased a used 35mm Leica camera, along with developing supplies and a book from which he learned the basics of his craft. By age 18 he was a precise, highly-skilled amateur.

At twenty years of age Errigo enrolled in the Photography School of the Army War College in Washington, D.C. There he was introduced to the large format Deardorff field camera and to Kodak's new color transparency film, Kodachrome -- a film unlike any other before or since. The reaction of professionals to Kodachrome was diverse. Technical masters such as Paul Outerbridge rejected it completely; press photographers had no use for it whatsoever; and those who appreciated color tended to carry a handy 35mm for candid snapshots.

Not so for Errigo. Having completed his classical training at the Hal Roach Motion Picture Studios in Hollywood, he always made the Deardorff his first choice and he attempted what few others did -- challenging and painstaking location work and action shots using studio techniques with a film rated at Weston 4 (predating ASA, this film is now considered to be equivalent to ASA 6-8).

From 1941 to 1943, Errigo traversed the United States shooting young GIs and civilians as America prepared for war. He was remarkably thorough, routinely shooting every setup in three color formats -- and once for good measure in 4x5 black and white. Errigo's accomplishments in this time period are magical. With his innate ability to see light, and his mastery of illustration and composition, Errigo transformed the mundane activities of drab GIs into some of the most remarkable icons of American patriotism ever created.

For eleven months in 1943 and 1944, Errigo led a color photographic team in combat from Algiers to Rome. Amazingly, he carried his Deardorff through the surf under fire at Anzio, and eventually earned four battle stars as a member of the hard-charging Allied 5th Army. His photographs of this period appeared in newspapers and periodicals world-wide, and include Generals Patton and Marshall, Mark Clark, Charles DeGaulle, Pope Pius XII and Marlene Dietrich, among others.

Incredibly, Errigo retired his private collection of perfectly preserved 8x10 and 4x5 Kodachromes for sixty years. It was only in October 2002, at the urging of his children and grandchildren, that he agreed to issue the Ilfochrome prints now being editioned by Gray Photographics in New York.