By Paul Fusco
Located in New York, NY
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...
Category
1960s Color Photography
