On a train, toward the end of the American dream

Mario Calabresi's account of the story of Paul Fusco's "Funeral Train" project. It starts from the story of the reportage and then tells of the thirty years Fusco himself spent looking for a publication.

On 8 June 1968 the editor of Look Magazine sends him to Penn Station without telling him what to photograph. Fusco gets on the train carrying Robert Kennedy's body from New York to Washington, pulls the window down and stays in the same seat for eight hours. Outside, a million people along the tracks. Look never runs the photographs, the magazine folds three years later, and the other 1,800 rolls only surface in 2006, at the Library of Congress. The evening frames, blurred and grainy for lack of light, looked like flaws at the time.

One of the most spectacular photographic projects in history, a cross-section of a nation.

Article by Mario Calabresi. Altre/Storie, 23 July 2020.