Robert F. Kennedy’s Funeral Train:

Paul Fusco travelled the world as a photojournalist. But his most indelible images, portraying a nation in mourning, were captured on a single day in 1968 as he rode aboard Robert F Kennedy’s funeral train from New York to Washington.

He died on 15 July at an assisted-living facility in San Anselmo, California. He was 89. He had complications from dementia, said his son, Anthony Fusco.

During the heart of his career, Fusco was a staff photographer for Look, which in the 1960s was Life magazine’s chief competitor. Both magazines had circulations of several million each and were known for their exceptional photography.

After joining Look in 1957, Fusco worked across Europe and Asia, and from Egypt to Mexico to Brazil. Drawn particularly to the downtrodden, he photographed Kentucky coal miners, homeless people in New York, migrant farmworkers in California and rural poverty in the south.

“I want to take pictures of people that, when you see them, you can feel their lives,” he told the Record newspaper of Bergen County, New Jersey, in 2005.

As the train emerged from a tunnel under the Hudson River and entered New Jersey, Fusco saw what would become his most memorable and poignant subject: ordinary citizens alongside the railroad tracks, bearing witness and sharing grief.

“I was astounded by the people,” Fusco told the Palm Beach Post in 2010. “I just reflexively jumped up, went to the window and pulled down the top pane. And I just stood in that window for eight hours and shot film. I was overwhelmed by the constant stream of people and the variety and mixture and visible pain and loss.”