A24 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESWEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2020Paul Fusco, a photographer
whose eye for the human impact
of earthshaking events was per-
haps never more evident than in
the images he took of track-side
mourners while riding Senator
Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train
in 1968, died on July 15 at an as-
sisted-living center in San An-
selmo, Calif. He was 89.
His son, Anthony, said the cause
was complications of dementia.
In a long career behind the cam-
era, Mr. Fusco worked for Look
magazine and the Magnum photo
agency and pursued self-financed
projects, including a photo series
documenting the sobering after-
math of the 1986 accident at the
Chernobyl nuclear power plant in
Ukraine.
His varied body of work includ-
ed images of hard-luck coal min-
ers in Kentucky in 1959, Cesar
Chavez and his farm workers in
1966, AIDS patients in San Fran-
cisco in 1993 and the funeral and
protests that followed the death of
Alberta Spruill during a botched
police raid in Harlem in 2003.
The Kennedy funeral train pho-
tographs, though, later compiled
in several books and used in an
HBO documentary, may have
been his best known. That was not
true when they were first taken,
however. On assignment for Look,
he shot thousands of images, but
the magazine used only one —
“not because they didn’t like
them,” he told Publishers Weekly
in 2008, but because the maga-
zine, a biweekly, was “a little be-
hind the story.”
After Look folded in 1971, the
photographs ended up in the Li-
brary of Congress, largely forgot-
ten, except by Mr. Fusco.
“As I remained the owner of my
photos,” he told the French publi-
cation L’Indépendant in 2008, “ev-
ery 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. Ken-
nedy Jr., published some for the
30th anniversary of the assassina-
tion. That led to a book, “RFK Fu-
neral 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.
“Paul had mentioned that there
were ‘some’ images at the Library
of Congress,” she told Publishers
Weekly, “so in good conscience
and due diligence, I checked it
out.”
She found more than 1,800 Ko-
dachrome slides.
“Paul’s body of work on that sin-
gle day — already so unique, im-
pressionistic, emotionally power-
ful — was so much more,” she said.
The photographs were gathered
into a book, “Paul Fusco: RFK,”
with an introduction by Norman
Mailer.
By the 50th anniversary, there
was an exhibition at the San Fran-
cisco Museum of Modern Art. In
The San Francisco Chronicle,
Charles Desmarais looked back,
assessing what Mr. Fusco had
made that day in June 1968.
“He would have not have
framed his project as conceptual
art, a term then only recently
coined, and one that an editorial
photographer would have re-
jected in that day,” he wrote. “Yet
his instinctual response to what
he saw as his train car slowed, city
by town by curve in the track, was
to extract something human from
an almost algorithmic serial
record.”
Mr. Fusco said the funeral trainseries had not been planned; his
editor had been vague in issuing
the assignment.
“He told me, ‘There’s a train, get
on it,’ ” Mr. Fusco told PublishersWeekly in 2008. “No instructions.”
He boarded the train as it set off
in New York after the senator’s fu-
neral there, but was mostly look-
ing ahead to the burial at Arling-ton National Cemetery in Virginia
that was to follow the train’s arriv-
al in Washington.
“All I was thinking about was
how to get access when we got toArlington,” he said. “Then, when
the train emerged from beneath
the Hudson, and I saw hundreds
of people on the platform watch-
ing the train come slowly through
— it went very slowly. I just
opened the window and began to
shoot.”
During the eight-hour ride, he
captured images of all sorts of
Americans, standing on rooftops,
waving flags, bowing their heads.
Some of the pictures, shot from
a moving train, are understand-
ably blurry.
“The motion that appears in a
lot of the photographs, for me, em-
phasized the breaking up of the
world,” Mr. Fusco told The New
York Times in 2008, “the breaking
up of a society, emotionally.”
John Paul Fusco was born on
Aug. 2, 1930, in Leominster, Mass.,
to Peter and Marie Rose
Thibaudeau Fusco. He became in-
terested in photography as a teen-
ager, and, after graduating from
high school, studied for six
months at the New York Institute
of Photography.
Mr. Fusco enlisted in the Army
in 1951 during the Korean War and
trained at the Army School of Pho-
tography. Sent to Korea, he was
wounded in combat and, his fam-
ily said, received a Purple Heart
and a Bronze Star.
After his military service, he
used the G.I. Bill to study at Drake
University in Iowa and then at
Ohio University, which had a fine
arts program in photography. He
graduated in 1957 and joined Look
as an assistant in the photo de-
partment but was soon made a
photographer. He joined Magnum
in 1973.
In addition to the Kennedy fu-
neral train photographs, Mr.
Fusco examined death and loss in
“Bitter Fruit,” an exhibition docu-
menting the funerals of soldiers
killed in the war in Iraq. The gov-
ernment had banned the pho-
tographing of flag-draped coffins
at American bases where the dead
were initially taken, but Mr. Fusco
went to cities and towns where
soldiers were being memorialized
in various ways.
“This is not some weepy melo-
drama engineered for a Holly-
wood movie,” Benjamin Genoc-
chio wrote in reviewing the exhi-
bition for The Times when it was
at the Aldrich Contemporary Art
Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., “but
a window onto a world of shocking
and realistic grief.”
Not all of Mr. Fusco’s work was
somber. In 1968 he took a particu-
larly evocative image of Janis Jop-
lin performing at the Fillmore in
San Francisco. In 1977, he and his
wife at the time, Patricia Sayer
Fusco, collaborated on a book
(“Marina & Ruby: Training a Filly
With Love”) about their daughter
and the horse she raised. In 1999,
he shot a series at the Cowtown
Rodeo in New Jersey.
Mr. Fusco’s marriage ended in
divorce in 1993, though he and his
former wife remained close. In ad-
dition to his son and daughter, Ma-
rina Fusco Nims, he is survived by
five grandchildren.
The photographs he shot in the
Chernobyl area during visits in
1997, 1999 and 2000 documented
birth defects among the popula-
tion, patients in a children’s can-
cer ward and more. They were col-
lected in a 2005 book, “Chernobyl
Legacy.”
In the 2008 interview with
L’Indépendant, he called that
project “the most important job of
my life.”Paul Fusco, 89, Dies; Photographed Nation’s Grief From a Funeral Train
Paul Fusco took images such as those above, and below left, from the train that carried the body of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL FUSCO/MAGNUM PHOTOSBy NEIL GENZLINGERMr. Fusco in an undated photo.
Look magazine used only one
of his thousands of images
from the assignment, but his
work from that ride has been
compiled in several books and
used in an HBO documentary.MAGNUM PHOTOSMr. Fusco strived for evocative imagery, such as a photograph of Janis Joplin in 1968 and a 1993 chronicle of AIDS patients.Emitt Rhodes, a singer and
songwriter who earned a cult sta-
tus among fans of Beatles-like
power-pop for a handful of albums
he released in the early 1970s,
then gave up recording for dec-
ades, has died at 70.
His body was found early Sun-
day at his home in the Hawthorne
area of Los Angeles, and he ap-
peared to have died overnight, al-
though the cause was unknown,
said Chris Price, his friend and
producer.
For certain connoisseurs of
rock history, Mr. Rhodes had long
epitomized a vital career cut
short. With a sweetly melancholic
tenor and a meticulous recording
style, he embodied a range of
sounds from the late 1960s and
early ’70s — Byrds-style folk-rock,
melodic psychedelia and the
tightly wound pop hooks of acts
like the Raspberries and Big Star.
His work was adored by gener-
ations of artists, among them the
Bangles, who early in their career
covered “Live,” a jangly garage-
rock classic by Mr. Rhodes’s band
the Merry-Go-Round that was re-
gional hit in Los Angeles in 1967,
when Mr. Rhodes was a teenager.
On three albums released on
the ABC/Dunhill label from 1970
to 1973, Mr. Rhodes blossomed
into a confident auteur, recording
bright and wistful songs in a home
studio — a path that, to fans, put
him in the lofty company of Paul
McCartney and Todd Rundgren.
But after “Farewell to Para-
dise” (1973), Mr. Rhodes abruptly
disappeared from the scene. At
just 23, he had been sued by his
record company over a contract
he could not fulfill, and he spent
the next four decades largely
working behind the scenes.
“I just burned out,” he said in an
interview with the British music
magazine Uncut in 2010. “I just
quivered and lay down on the
ground in the fetal position. And
that was that.”
Emitt Lynn Rhodes was born on
Feb. 25, 1950, in Decatur, Ill. When
he was 4, his father, a machinist,
relocated the family to
Hawthorne, and Emitt remained
tied to that area for the rest of his
life. His early solo albums were re-corded in a shed on his parents’
property, and he later bought a
house across the street and estab-
lished a studio in a garage there.
By 1965, the teenage Mr.
Rhodes was playing drums in a
garage band, the Palace Guard,
which, like many groups of thatera, took musical cues from the
Byrds and the Beatles and culti-
vated a sartorial gimmick; theirs
was the red uniform of royal
British guardsmen. In his next
band, the Merry-Go-Round,
which was signed to A&M
Records, he was the leader and
primary songwriter.
Mr. Rhodes was signed to ABC/
Dunhill as a solo artist, which in
1970 released his debut, “Emitt
Rhodes.” On songs like “Fresh as a
Daisy”— filled with baroque piano
lines, rich harmonies and catchy
guitar parts — he came across as a
fully formed singer-songwriter
with a clear debt to Mr. McCart-
ney.
The album reached No. 29 on
Billboard’s chart. To capitalize on
its success, A&M released “The
American Dream,” a compilation
of tracks that Mr. Rhodes had re-
corded with studio musicians dur-
ing his Merry-Go-Round days. It
confused consumers and stunted
Mr. Rhodes’s momentum.
He also struggled to meet his
contractual obligations, which
had called for six albums in three
years. A perfectionist, it took him
nearly a year to complete his first
record alone. He made two more
LPs — “Mirror” and “Farewell to
Paradise” — but ABC sued him for
falling behind schedule, and he
ceased recording. Friends de-
scribed him as feeling betrayed by
the business.
“From the first moment he
signed his deal, he was already be-
hind the eight ball,” said Mr. Price,
a fan who sought out Mr. Rhodes
in the mid-2000s and, after years
building his trust, produced
“Rainbow Ends,” a 2016 album
that his first major release in 43years.
For most of the intervening
years, Mr. Rhodes had been a
phantom in the Los Angeles music
world. He had worked as a staff
producer for the Elektra label,
producing an album for the Cana-
dian performer Bim and a 1976
novelty single by the actor and co-
median Gabe Kaplan, “Up Your
Nose” — a catchphrase from Mr.
Kaplan’s hit television show, “Wel-
come Back, Kotter.” He also re-
corded bands at his home studio
and made at least one abortive at-
tempt to restart his recording ca-
reer.
In interviews, Mr. Rhodes made
references to his struggles with
drugs and alcohol. His survivors
include two sons, Forrest and
Ethan, and a daughter, Thea.
His return to the spotlight be-
gan around 2009, with a documen-
tary, “The One Man Beatles,” di-
rected by Cosimo Messeri, whichfeatured artists like the Bangles
and Michael Penn, as well as the
film director Allison Anders, dis-
cussing Mr. Rhodes’s influence.
In it, Mr. Rhodes, now burly and
white-bearded, joked about his ob-
scurity with a touch of bitterness.
Strangers on the street, he said,
sometimes thanked him for his
music. “They think I look like the
guy from the Grateful Dead,” he
said.
“Rainbow Ends” includes con-
tributions from artists who were
inspired by Mr. Rhodes, among
them Susanna Hoffs of the Ban-
gles, Aimee Mann, Jon Brion and
Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and Ja-
son Falkner of the group Jellyfish.
Despite his long absence, Mr.
Rhodes described the album as a
continuation.
“The songs feel like they’ve
been around forever,” he told The
New York Times in an interview.
“They’re eternal.”Emitt Rhodes, 70, a Rocker Who Shone All Too Briefly
Mr. Rhodes in 2016. He was often compared to Paul McCartney.TIMOTHY NORRIS/GETTY IMAGESBy BEN SISARIOEmitt Rhodes’s three 1970s albums, and his 2016 return album.ABC-DUNHILL RECORDS AND OMNIVORE RECORDSInspiring other artists
despite not recording
for four decades.