Paul Fusco and the RFK Funeral Train - a remembrance returns to one of the most haunting public moments in American photography. On view from June 4 to 11, 2026, the presentation marks the anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination and revisits the funeral train that carried his body from New York to Washington, D.C., and then to Arlington National Cemetery.
Paul Fusco, working on assignment for
LOOK magazine, rode the train and photographed the crowds that gathered along the route. The images show families, workers and children standing beside the tracks in towns and cities across the country. They are ordinary faces caught in an extraordinary moment, and together they form a record of public grief that still carries force nearly six decades later.
Kennedy was killed on June 5, 1968, and the funeral train became a national event watched in silence by millions. Fusco’s photographs, made from the moving train window, capture a country suspended between shock and reflection. The pictures do not rely on spectacle. Their strength comes from repetition, from the steady sequence of people who stopped to watch, and from the range of emotions that pass across their faces as the train moves by.
The selection of 20 images highlights both the scale of Fusco’s original coverage and the discipline behind it. He made hundreds of photographs that day, building one of the most recognizable visual archives of public mourning in American history. The work also connects to Kennedy’s message of justice and compassion, which remained central to his political legacy and continues to shape how the era is remembered.
Presented as a remembrance, the exhibition treats photography as both document and witness. Fusco’s images preserve a national moment, but they also point to something more enduring: the way grief, memory and public life often appear most clearly in the faces of strangers gathered at the edge of the road.
Image:
#20 from the series "RFK Funeral Train", 1968 © Paul Fusco