This second edition of Fusco's photo-book includes seventy never-before-seen images of the events around RFK's funeral from the Look Magazine archive
Paul Fusco
"I want the viewers to be moved into the lives of the people that they are looking at; the visual experience is incredibly emotional."
- Paul Fusco
Paul Fusco was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1930. He worked as a photographer with the United States Army Signal Corps in Korea from 1951 to 1953, before studying photojournalism at Ohio University, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1957. He moved to New York City and started his career as a staff photographer with Look magazine. In this role, he produced important reportages on social issues in the US, including the plight of destitute miners in Kentucky, Latino ghetto life in New York City, cultural experimentation in California, African-American life in the Mississippi delta, religious proselytizing in the South, and migrant laborers. He also worked in England, Israel, Egypt, Japan, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, and he made an extended study of the Iron Curtain countries, from northern Finland to Iran.
Fusco moved to Mill Valley, California, in 1970. After Look closed down in 1971, Fusco approached Magnum Photos, becoming an associate in 1973 and a full member the following year. His photography has been published widely in major US magazines, including Time, Life, Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today, as well as in other publications worldwide.
Fusco’s later career focus was photographing the lives of the oppressed. Among his subjects were people living with AIDS in California, homelessness and the welfare system in New York, the American military victims of the Iraq War, and the Zapatista uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas. He also worked on a long-term project documenting Belarussians sickened by radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl explosion.
His most acclaimed work was the result of a Look assignment in 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated and his body was carried by train from New York to Washington, DC. Many of those unpublished images eventually appeared in the book Paul Fusco: RFK (and two more expanded editions), inspired an HBO documentary, and were exhibited around the world. A hugely successful installation of the photos, known as The Train, was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018.
Paul Fusco died in July 2020 in San Anselmo, California.
