Robert F. Kennedy's Funeral Train, Fifty Years Later (from 2018)

[demmiblue]

“The Train: RFK’s Last Journey” is an ingenious and, in a surprising way, affecting exhibition that opened last month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Although the train in question is the one that, almost fifty years ago, carried Robert Kennedy’s body from New York City to Washington, D.C., for burial in Arlington Cemetery, the show is not about Kennedy. The show is about death—or, more exactly, about the relationship between photography and death.

That relationship has always been intimate. “Photography,” Barthes writes in “Camera Lucida,” “is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.” Life is motion, and film is about motion: it was to study motion that film technology was invented. But photography immobilizes. Photographs snatch people out of time. And we take pictures to memorialize. We imagine one day looking at them when the people in them are no longer alive. Even when you look at a photo of some random person, anyone, taken years ago, somewhere in your mind the thought creeps in: “And that person is probably now dead.”

Robert Kennedy is now dead. He was shot in the head at 12:15 A.M., on June 5, 1968, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, moments after declaring victory in the California Democratic primary. He had been campaigning for President for not even three months. He never regained consciousness and died the following day. His body was flown to New York City, where, on June 8th, a funeral was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Immediately afterward, the casket was put on a train to Washington.

The heart of the SFMOMA show is a set of twenty-one photographs taken from aboard that train by a photographer named Paul Fusco. It was a last-minute assignment from Look, where Fusco was a staff photographer, and he assumed that his main task would be in Arlington, where Kennedy was to be buried next to his brother John. But when the train emerged from the Hudson River tunnel, Fusco was amazed to see people lining the tracks. He found a spot at an open window, and, for the eight hours it took the train to get to Washington, he shot picture after picture of the crowds who came out to witness Kennedy’s body being carried to its grave.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/robert-f-kennedys-funeral-train-fifty-years-later

[demmiblue]

1. Of all the images of Americans waiting by the track in 1968 to pay their respects as Robert Kennedy'

Of all the images of Americans waiting by the track in 1968 to pay their respects as Robert Kennedy's funeral train passes by, this one particularly moves me representing - as I think it does - the hope that working people & those in poverty had placed in him.

Link to tweet

[Docreed2003]

2. K&R

Thank you for this! RFK is one of my political heroes and his funeral train has always been a touching and intriguing part of his story.

[electric_blue68]

3. TY. I watched the whole thing on TV. It was So Sad, and So Moving! Thank goodness he was on that...

train taking photos!

As well as who ever filmed from the train as well.

[Trueblue1968]

4. BOBBY KENNEDY was shot the night of my high school graduation. i cried for hours.