NORWAY — After laying dormant for nearly six decades, a curated selection of photographs from the Korean War will make their debut at the Lajos Matolcsy Arts Center on Friday.  

Galen Leavitt may already be known for the two days he spent photographing Marilyn Monroe, but daughter Margo Pullen long knew his legacy lay in the hundreds of images he snapped as a young, largely untrained photographer during the early 1950s.

The exhibit boasts about 50 black-and-white and colored images, with topics encompassing the breadth of wartime life. Stationed in Japan while commissioned to document aerial photos of battlefields and downed planes for the U.S. Air Force, the work is as much a portrait of the horrors of war as it is a young man seeking a semblance of normalcy while surrounded by destruction. 

“I think the reason he wanted these to be protected was because deep down he thought someday they’d be of value to somebody,” Pullen said. 

Far from home, Pullen reckons her father searched from humanism in his photos, an internal  battle to match his environment. Numerous scenes depict Korean villagers at work, carrying bundles of sticks in large woven baskets, pausing in their daily work to smile at a foreigner with a camera. 

Another standout features a U.S. serviceman working on the landing gear of a plane. Still another captures the laborious effort of hauling a barge out to sea with a length of rope. 

Leavitt died in October 2012, leaving behind untold memories of his war experience, captured in poignant moments Pullen uncovered after going through his affects.  

Over the past half year, Pullen has worked with local artist Steve Traficonte to scan and develop the negatives. 

The process has unearthed more questions about what Leavitt thought of the war as it has answered. In some ways, Pullen’s title for the show, “My dad’s perspective: Preserving Beauty amid war” is a daughter’s intuition about her father’s thoughts and feelings while encountering the terror and mundane in a war zone. 

Few of the photos are captioned. It’s not always clear from outside the viewers’ interpretation where or when the images were taken or even who the subjects were. 

Leavitt was reluctant to speak about his experiences, and Pullen said she and her three sisters respected his silence. The mystery of the photos makes the details tantalizing and engrossing.

Ben Tucker, who helped Pullen connect with Norway’s Western Maine Art Group, said the photos were remarkably skilled for a young man with only a few weeks of formal training. 

“I think he was saying, ‘My gosh, there’s humanity here and I’ve got to keep in touch with it,” Tucker said. 

Their arrangement is as much a conversation between father and daughter about what couldn’t be said during his lifetime as it is about the compositional savvy of a young man with a camera.

“This is the sort of project we seek for the Matolcsy Center: high-quality artwork with local interest,” Western Maine Art Group president Mike Everett said. 

The show opens in the 480 Main Street art center 5 p.m Sept. 19.