Paul Fusco
Untitled from The RFK Funeral Train
1968

Name: Untitled from The RFK Funeral Train
Brand: Paul Fusco
Price: 7500 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Listing includes free shipping for unframed prints to the continental U.S. and a 14-day return policy. Paul Fusco RFK Funeral Train Portfolio, 1968/2008 24 x 16 inch fujiflex print Edition 3 of 10 Signed and editioned on separate certificate Biography - In the middle of 1968, two events shook the nation - the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4th and the assassination of Robert Kennedy on June 5th. Hastily arranged, Robert Kennedy’s funeral train took place on June 8th – a swelteringly hot early summer day. Paul Fusco, then a staff for LOOK Magazine, was given a place with other journalists on the train. As the train made its progress down the eastern seaboard, hundreds of thousands of mourners came out to line the railway tracks and pay their final respects to Bobby Kennedy and all 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 for the train to make the usually four-hour journey Fusco never put down his camera except to reload film shooting approximately 2,000 pictures. The resulting images are one of the most powerful and affecting series of photographs ever taken. Shot on Kodachrome film – a film with a particularly vibrant palette favored at the time by photojournalists – Fusco's pictures blend the spontaneous look of snapshots with artistic precision of the decisive moment. If there was ever an example of a photographer being “in the zone” Fusco’s beautifully composed frames are like Zen arrows each hitting their target. Each photograph carries its own weight and tells its own story, but cumulatively the series is an epic vision of America. Because LOOK Magazine's bi-weekly schedule caused it to come out a week after its rival LIFE, the magazine chose to print a retrospective album of pictures of RFK rather than pictures of the funeral, and so Fusco's RFK Funeral Train photographs were relegated to the picture files. Three years later, LOOK magazine folded and donated the approximately five million pictures in their archive to the Library of Congress. Fusco managed to hold on to just over a hundred of his pictures. The photographs would have remained an editorial footnote, were it not for the efforts of Natasha Lunn, a young photo editor at Magnum, who was shown the work in 1998 and passed them on to GEORGE magazine who published the pictures to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the RFK's death. The rediscovery had begun. Paul Fusco was born in Leominster, Massachusetts in 1930. He received his B.F.A. in photojournalism from Ohio University and went directly to work for Look magazine as a staff photographer and traveled extensively in South East Asia, Mexico, India, Europe and Russia. In 1974 he joined Magnum Photos. His work has appeared in publications such as LIFE, Time, Newsweek, The Sunday Times and Paris Match. He has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C..

Creator:

Paul Fusco (1930, American)

Creation Year:

1968

Dimensions:

Height: 23 in (58.42 cm)Width: 15 in (38.1 cm)

More Editions & Sizes:

36 x 24 inches, AP after a sold out edition of 5Price: $30,000

Period:

1960-1969

Framing:

Framing Options Available