Paul Fusco: 1930 – 2020

Magnum member Paul Fusco died on July 15th, 2020

In 1968 – on commission for Look – Fusco travelled across the United States on the funeral train of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy – following his assassination. Of the assassination Fusco said,  “The blow was monumental. Hope-on-the-rise had again been shattered and those in most need of hope crowded the tracks of Bobby’s last train, stunned into disbelief, and watched that hope trapped in a coffin pass and disappear from their lives.” This work – a series of photos of track-side mourners – became his book RFK Funeral Train – a portrait of a nation in mourning.

“Paul is, and will always be, in my heart and mind, the kind of human being that I think of as the best of what a human can be. A wonderful caring human being who happens to be a photographer. He is the best of us who speak with our respective approaches of capturing this world that we live in for a while.”

Eli Reed

Paul Fusco, Photographer on a Funeral Train, Dies at 89

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“As I remained the owner of my photos,” he told the French publication L’Indépendant in 2008, “every five years, on the anniversary of Bobby’s death, I offered them to magazines. They never took them.”

That is, until George magazine, whose founders included Senator Kennedy’s nephew John F. Kennedy Jr., published some for the 30th anniversary of the assassination. That led to a book, “RFK Funeral Train,” in 2000. For the 40th anniversary of the assassination, in 2008, Lesley A. Martin of the Aperture Foundation was seeking to update that book.

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The photographs he shot in the Chernobyl area during visits in 1997, 1999 and 2000 documented birth defects among the population, patients in a children’s cancer ward and more. They were collected in a 2005 book, “Chernobyl Legacy.”

In the 2008 interview with L’Indépendant, he called that project “the most important job of my life.”

Mais um grande que se foi!

E se você quiser comprar o livro de Paul Fusco, aqui tem um…