Photographer created 1968 series from RFK funeral train
When the unmarked funeral train carrying Robert F. Kennedy pulled out of Penn Station in New York, photographer Paul Fusco was aboard, on assignment for Look magazine to shoot the burial on the other end.
Fusco was not allowed to shoot the flagdraped coffin or the Kennedy entourage and was not planning to lift his Leica camera until the train reached Arlington National Cemetery. But when the passenger car emerged from the Hudson River tunnel, Fusco was shocked to find a mass of people lined up along the tracks in the harsh New Jersey heat of June 8, 1968.
“It was just overwhelming ...
like an explosion,” Fusco told The Chronicle 50 years later. “I jumped out of my chair, pulled the window down and just started automatically photographing.”
He did not stop until he had chronicled that sad day on a sad train. This nonassignment would end up the most famous photographic essay in a long and distinguished career for Fusco, who traveled the world from his Mill Valley home base.
Fusco died July 15 at an assisted living facility in San Anselmo, said his son Anthony Fusco (pronounced “Foosco”), a San Francisco stage actor. Paul Fusco suffered from advanced dementia and had fallen and broken a hip six days prior to his death. He was 89.
Fusco, who had been on staff at Look from 1957 until its demise in 1971, had published national magazine work on nearly every American social justice cause of the 1960s, from poverty in the Appalachians to the Summer of Love in San Francisco — an assignment that compelled him to convince the editor of Look that it needed a fulltime, West Coast staff photographer. When Look folded, he moved fulltime to Magnum, the exclusive, invitationonly photography cooperative based in New York City and Paris. In all, Fusco’s career spanned more than 50 years without stopping or even slowing.
“I remember when I was photographing a street demonstration on Market Street against the Gulf War. I saw Paul with his Leicas photographing, and the next thing I know he is arrested,” said documentary photographer Ken Light, who runs the photojournalism department at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. “I said, ‘Wait. That is Paul Fusco. He worked for Look. How could you arrest him?’ But away he went on a police bus. That was Paul, always in the middle of things.”
John Paul Fusco was born Aug. 2, 1930, in Leominster, Mass., where his father, an
Italian immigrant, played clarinet in big bands and taught every wind instrument. Fusco was given a camera for his 14th birthday, and his life was instantly laid out before him.
Painfully shy to the point that he was afraid to pull the bell on a public bus to signal his stop, Fusco discovered that the camera was a strategic weapon for blocking out shyness. Out of high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was trained at the Army School of Photography in Monmouth, N.J. He was assigned to the 7th Division Signal Company and saw combat during the Korean War.
A tank unit he was assigned to came under attack, and Fusco was hit by shrapnel. He still managed to drag another wounded soldier to safety, which earned both a Bronze Star for valor and a Purple Heart that would probably be an unknown fact except that his son later found the medals in his father’s closet and confronted him with it.
“Dad was opposed to almost all forms of organized authority,” Anthony Fusco said. But he was not opposed to the G.I. Bill, which paid for his postwar education at Ohio University, one of the few colleges offering a degree in photography. He graduated summa cum laude in 1957, and moved to New York City where he was hired as an assistant in the photography department at Look.
He was soon promoted and had already built a reputation when he was assigned to ride on the Kennedy funeral train, operated by Penn Central, in 1968. When the pallbearers saw the crowds along the track, the coffin was raised up off the floor so it could be seen by people who had come to watch in business suits, bathing suits and baseball uniforms.
They stood on the roofs of cars and station houses and on fence posts, and they held homemade signs: “RFK RIP” and “SoLong Bobby.” It was 225 miles that should have taken four hours. It ended up taking eight.
“Most of us hide most of the time. We don’t want people aware of what we are feeling,” Fusco told The Chronicle. “But that day, very few people were hiding. It was a consistent wave of emotion without interruption.”
That same year, Fusco published his first book, “Sense Relaxation: Below the Mind,” about the human potential movement at Big Sur. He then embarked on a deep project photographing migrant farmworkers in the Central Valley, which became his second book, “La Causa: the California Grape Strike,” published in 1970. It was followed by “Marina and Ruby” (1977), focused on his daughter Marina and the horse she boarded at a stable on Mount Tamalpais.
In 1993, Fusco and his wife of 35 years, Patricia, were divorced. He left Mill Valley for West Milford, N.J. From that point on, he worked on his own projects as a member of Magnum, which he had been invited to join in 1973. He was still with Magnum when he moved back to Marin County in 2009.
The Kennedy funeral train images that became Fusco’s legacy did not even make the cover of Look. The color film was converted to blackandwhite to be used as inside art for a magazine article. Fusco’s work did not appear in color until books were finally published in 2000 and 2008.
In 2018, they were published again in a hardbound catalog to accompany a 50th anniversary exhibition, titled “The Train: RFK’s Last Journey,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
It opened that March, and Fusco came to the opening, camera around his neck though already suffering from dementia.
“He was beaming,” said Linde B. Lehtinen, an SFMOMA assistant curator of photography.
On June 8, 2018, the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s funeral journey, Lehtinen went to the third floor gallery to watch the visitors interact with Fusco’s photos.
“There were men from that generation looking at the photographs, and their eyes were welling up with tears,” she said. “It was a transformative experience for me to work on that exhibition because of the strength and hope in Fusco’s images.”
Survivors include exwife Patricia Sayer Fusco of San Anselmo, son Anthony Fusco of San Francisco and daughter Marina Fusco Nims of Petaluma. A public memorial is pending. Gifts in his memory can be made online to the Magnum Foundation.
“Paul was always a nice guy with a big smile, which you don’t always see in the competitive world of photojournalism,” Light said. “He was a role model and a mentor to younger photographers. But mainly he was a great photographer. His images remain both powerful and deeply connecting.”