"RFK"
by Paul Fusco
Aperture Boooks, NY
2008
180 pp., 80 color illustrations, 11½x8"
"Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it."
"SO-LONG BOBBY"
Camelot seems like a long time ago or a place that never was for the majority of we Americans who grew up long after the Kennedy family held the nation's heart with their prominent place in politics and celebrity culture. We've read about JFK in textbooks and heard his powerful words, especially in relation to service and setting the bar higher for each of us to make the United States a better place. Some of us remember John Jr.'s plane crash and could only grasp slightly the outpouring of feeling at the departure of Edward Kennedy from his role in politics, and then from this earthly plane. It was a finality for a family my generation will never know, as well as for that of an America uprooted by the 1960s and thrust into a cynical worldview with that triumvirate of assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, coinciding with the failure of the Vietnam War and the long Cold War, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall, sadly again, an event that I witnessed as a child but the significance of which I could not grasp.
Perhaps in this way it seems like a better part of recent history has always been out of reach. That seems to be changing somewhat in my 30s. A student of mine, who is now 18, asked me to explain the events of 9/11 to her. It was oddly exhilarating yet scary that such a recent event in my mind is also the distant past for her short life. "RFK" is not the experience of a photojournalist witnessing an event but that of decoding an event through its aftermath, or in a more personal way, through the faces of those who experienced tragedy. Perhaps this is why most photojournalism feels empty as it is largely a record of events with emotions put in view as means to an end, rather than an end unto themselves.
"RFK" is a book I first saw in its original incarnation as "RFK Funeral Train" a slim, stunning book of photographs by Paul Fusco from 2001, shot from vantage of the train that carried RFK's body from New York to Washington D.C. for his internment on June 8, 1968. "Funeral Train" was a modest paperback that I meant to buy for a while until it just sort of got away from me. It features a striking cover image. In dusk light, two men stand on a small plank bridge between a frontage road and train tracks. Lit from behind, they appear to be a disheveled father and teen son, each saluting the train as it rolls by at high speed. They are flanked by a woman holding a hand to her heart, standing partly in the shadow of a boarded up white structure. The figures are all small in the frame, tilting slightly from the effect of Fusco's odd angle of shooting from train-height, and exaggerated further by the wide-angle distortion of his lens and blurring movement of the train's progress to its destination. There is something proudly resilient about the figures, as if they know the meaning of labor and hunger yet wouldn't be cynical to say that someone completely unlike them could understand the meaning of calloused hands.
Alas, that image is not the cover here but it is still found within the larger "RFK" volume that represents a greater unearthed collection of Fusco's images unearthed from the archives of LOOK magazine. It is the color of these pictures that most immediately draws one in. Saturated yellows and reds that you recognize immediately as indicative of Kodachrome transparency, that first mass-market color film that dominated slide films for the better part of a century. It's a color that feels almost inherently American, so deeply different from the cool tones of Fuji Velvia that it's like any image shot on Kodachrome is an invocation of historical significance. Between the color of the film itself and the general palette of the 1960s, Fusco's images are like getting sucked into a journey through the last days of American promise.
It really is "Funeral Train" not the new title of "RFK" that these images represent, for this series doesn't represent the successes of RFK as attorney general, civil rights advocate, or state senator. Here RFK is the mystery of a man mourned, rather than that of a life lived. Figures with forlorn faces stand by the railroad tracks arms crossed, flags waving, or hands waving, as if to say goodbye to someone great. That's all we can really know from the pictures themselves. All colors and ages of people line up to say farewell to a symbol of hope, shot down on the eve of a presidential campaign. Crowds go by in blur after blur of people trying to get a view of the train carrying someone barely known, yet containing great hope.
On page 197 a family of seven stand evenly spaced from short to tall. On the left are five shoeless children, barely clothed and dirty from play. The youngest barely squeezes into the frame at perhaps five years old. The oldest of about twelve, looks into the camera, standing next to his dressed parents, fully clothed but showing signs of hard work on their faces. The light gives off the glow of the time right after sunset, when blues have a pleasant dusky warmth. The family stands in testament, a humble gesture of sequence and space to a man the children never knew, from parents who can now only remember time lost.
The book closes with an increasingly blurry series of images as the shutter speed seems to get slower and slower as the light dims, followed then by a wholly unnecessary series of night-time images of the funeral itself. It really lessens the work, this pale effort to give closure to the train journey by filling the frame with black-clad mourners bearing candles in the dark. The loss here is experienced more profoundly through all the people who lined the train tracks, not by the officiated ceremony.
They are touching photographs to a recent, memorable America, leaving both a lump in the throat at the tremendous show of affection for Kennedy but also a feeling of great hope. While cynically it is hard to imagine people lining-up for any contemporary politician, that isn't necessarily true. It's hard to know what love people are capable of until crisis occurs, and even harder to know what greatness could arise from the American people in decades to come.
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