RFK Funeral Train.

Signed. In 1968, New York's Senator Robert F. Kennedy was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president and looked to be on his way to victory. On June 5th, after winning the State's Democratic primary race, he was assassinated in California. His funeral took place at St Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, on June 5th. Paul Fusco, then a staff photographer for Look magazine, was on board the train which carried Robert F. Kennedy's coffin along the East Coast from New York to Arlington Cemetery, Washington D.C. These photographs show some of the hundreds of thousands of the mourners who lined the route.

Look's bi-weekly schedule meant that it came out a week after its main rival Life, and by that point, the funeral had been covered extensively elsewhere, though they did use two of Fusco's photographs reproduced in black-and-white. As a result, the bulk of Fusco's photographs remained unpublished at the time. Three years later, Look folded, and it donated its picture library of approximately five million photographs to the Library of Congress.

Fusco managed to retain just over a hundred of his RFK photographs but did nothing with the series until 1998, when Natasha Lunn, a young photo editor at Magnum, found them and proposed them to George, the political and lifestyle monthly magazine founded and edited by John Kennedy, Jr., Robert's nephew, for use in a feature on the 30th anniversary of his death. The following year, the Photographers' Gallery in London exhibited the series for the first time.

'An incomparable document of gestures of public grief, [his] photographs capture a moment of cultural shift unlike almost any other.'

First trade edition, signed in silver pen on title-page; (179 x 279 mm, 7 x 11 in); colour photographs; grey endpapers, photo-illustrated paper-covered boards, photo-illustrated dust jacket, fine; [128]pp.