CAPE ELIZABETH – Sitting in the chair nearest the window so his glaucoma-filled eyes could see the page, 91-year-old John Rich flipped through the black and white anthologies of war photographers David Douglas Duncan and Carl Mydans.

“Did I tell you,” he said, “of when I was in Tokyo a month before the war?”

A U.S. Marine and Japanese interpreter in World War II, Rich had easily found a job with the International News Service when the war ended, and was quickly shipped off to Tokyo to file stories.

A month before the Korean Conflict began, Rich walked into the Tokyo press club and found himself called over to a group of now-famous Life magazine photographers, including Duncan and Mydans. The group’s Japanese interpreter had left, and the men wanted to visit “this funny little company called Nikon,” Rich said with a smirk.

He left the Nikon meeting with a camera, sought basic photography lessons from his photojournalist friends, and when war was declared in June 1950, he slung the camera over one shoulder and went into Korea.

There, as a writer and occasional radio correspondent for INS and eventually NBC, Rich took photos only for himself, snapped in his spare time. While Duncan and Mydans were shooting in black and white – a far easier medium for an on-the-ground photographer – Rich was in love with color, so he shot on the Kodachrome film he bought whenever he was on leave in Japan. He packed the transparencies away in a tin Japanese tea chest and didn’t pull them out again for 50 years.

It was “a fluke of history,” Rich said, as he looked down at the yellowed pages of his mentors’ black and white images. Because he was stationed in Korea for the entire three years of the war, Rich said his nearly 1,000 photos make the most extensive collection of color photos of the war. In fact, his are some of the only color photos of the Korean conflict.

For Americans who remember, research or think about the “Forgotten War,” said Dave Kirkwood, a local photo enthusiast and member of the Portland Camera Club, those memories are in black and white. Rich’s collection, he said, “are a magnificent archive of pictures that nobody else has. His photos are an opportunity to give that war full color.”

On Monday, thanks to Kirkwood and the camera club, Rich will present about 200 of his favorite images to the public at the South Portland Public Library. Though Rich’s photos and stories have gained some attention from the local media and most recently from Smithsonian magazine, many of his images have been seen only by his children, wife and interested neighbors.

When Rich uncovered his tea chest of perfectly preserved photos about 10 years ago to show one of those interested neighbors, the memories came flooding back.

In an upstairs room of his seaside cottage, Rich took a stack of printed photos from a cardboard electronics box and slowly pulled at the rubber band around them.

Every image stirs a story – a Korean boy standing on and waving from the wreckage of a Russian plane calls forth a flash of Japanese soldiers learning to fly planes much heavier than the Zeros they were used to. He told of watching a soldier attempt a roll at 1,000 feet. It would have been easy in a Zero, but ended poorly, Rich said, dropping an upturned hand toward the floor.

As Rich flipped through the photos, he pointed out his favorites – a long Navy ship surrounded by the bright blues of sea and sky and a backdrop of gray, snow-capped mountains; Korean children in bright yellow and pink garments playing on a see-saw, one child a blur of color as she flies up in the air; the facade of a large stone building whose back side has been bombed away to let the blue, cloud-specked sky show through every window and door.

While the black and white images of Duncan and Mydans seem to fit the war and the time, Rich’s photos could almost have been taken yesterday, if not for the dated names, faces and clothes. And Rich’s photos rarely show the blood or brutality of war, focusing instead on smiling soldiers, Korean civilian life and a Betty Hutton performance for American officers.

When the war in Korea ended, Rich went on to cover Vietnam and other major conflicts of the 20th century, including the Gulf War – remarkable, since Rich was in his 70s at the time.

Finished with wars and with his children grown, Rich retired to his home town of Cape Elizabeth with his wife, Doris Lee, whom he met while playing tennis at the Chosin Hotel in Korea. D. Lee, as he calls her, is his “Seoul mate.”

As Rich closed the black and white books of Duncan and Mydans, glancing at the latest copy of Smithsonian on the coffee table, he said he hopes the recent attention from that magazine and others will inspire a full-color anthology of his own work.

His glaucoma will likely prevent him from enjoying such a book, but for him, the war is just as sharp and colorful as it ever was. A published collection would be for others, for history, to bring new light to a forgotten war.