RFK Funeral Train by Paul Fusco: Forty Years Later

“On Saturday
afternoon, June 8, Kennedy’s body, like President Lincoln’s 103 years
before, was carried by a funeral train from New York to Washington. As
they had for Lincoln, many thousands – perhaps, for RFK, a million
people – lined the tracks. The coffin, on a bier close to the floor of
the observation car, could not be seen by bystanders. So Kennedy’s
pallbearers lifted it up and placed it, a bit precariously, on chairs.
Along the route of the train, Boy Scouts and firemen braced at
attention; nuns, some wearing dark glasses, stood witness; housewives
wept. Thousands and thousands of black people waited quietly in the
heat, perhaps because they lived close to the tracks, but also because
they had felt for Kennedy, and knew they would miss him. “Marvelous
crowds,” said Arthur Schlesinger, staring out the window as the train
slowly rocked south. “Yes,” said Kenny O’Donnell [a long – time friend
and aide]. “But what are they good for now?”

Excerpt from “Robert Kennedy: His Life, by Evan Thomas

These images are from Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train, to be re-released by Aperture in September. A show of the work opens at Danziger Projects tomorrow. See a great New York Times slideshow with accompanying Fusco narration, telling of the 8 hours he spent shooting from the train and over 2000 Kodachrome images that he took on this iconic and unforgettable assignment for Look Magazine.

There’s a first edition of this book that I have only by stroke of luck; a friend of mine happened to work at Umbrage Editions when it was released. It’s been lovely to see so much coverage of these images in the past few weeks, as they are just truly mesmerizing; Fusco was shooting out the window of a moving train, with slow film, wide open. The gradations of focus are incredibly poignant and sometimes even approach the feel of tilt-shift photography. And that family in a row! In any case, some samples: