Rein Jelle Terpstra: Robert F. Kennedy Funeral Train—The People’s View

Rein Jelle Terpstra: Robert F. Kennedy Funeral Train—The People’s View

June 11–October 16, 2022

On June 8, 1968, a year shaken by division and violence across the United States, the coffin of assassinated senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) was carried on a funeral train from New York to Washington, D.C. Around one million people turned out to bid farewell to RFK in a spontaneous expression of grief. On board was photographer Paul Fusco, who took pictures of the bewildered mourners as they watched the train, which for the most part remained outside the camera’s lens, pass slowly by. Fascinated by what these people saw, between 2014 and 2017, Rein Jelle Terpstra (Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, 1960) carried out a thorough investigation in search of these people, gathering the photographs and home videos they took that day.

RFK Funeral Train—The People’s View is based on a reversal of Fusco’s photographic perspective. Here, the mourners not only play a key role in the images taken by another person, Fusco, but become photographers and filmmakers themselves, recording and documenting this historic moment with their own cameras. This project is made up of recollections, memories, snapshots, home movies and sound, recorded by some of the many people who lined the train tracks that day, providing a meticulously elaborated vision of a parallel history, the one constructed by all sorts of people, in an alternative universe where the spectator is a witness of history from the other side.