In the middle of 1968, two events shook the nation — the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on June 5. Hastily arranged, Robert Kennedy’s funeral train traveled on June 8 –- a sweltering early summer day. Paul Fusco, then a staff photographer for Look magazine, was given a place with other journalists on the train. As the train progressed down the Eastern Seaboard, hundreds of thousands of mourners lined the tracks to pay their final respects to Bobby Kennedy and all that he stood for. From inside the train, Fusco began to take pictures of the mourners, people from every section of society — black, white, rich, poor — in large groups and on their own. For the eight hours it took the train to make the usually four-hour journey, Fusco never put down his camera except to reload film, shooting approximately 2,000 pictures.
“Paul Fusco: RFK’s Funeral Train – 1968” exhibition is on view at Danziger Gallery in New York City through June 22. A concurrent exhibition, “The Train: RFK’s Last Journey” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, runs through June 10 and brackets Fusco’s photographs with video work by Philippe Parreno and an archival project by Rein Terpstra, which tracked down pictures of the train taken by the people who lined the rails.
