The photographs Paul Fusco took on June 8, 1968 are ever-so-slightly blurred. They show people saluting, or waving flags, a family standing in order of height, a group of people lined up on a bridge.

Mostly, the people are indicating respect, but occasionally there is open grief — a girl kneeling on the tracks; a woman holding out her arms, as if to embrace the body of her fallen hero.

The fallen hero was assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, and Fusco was on the funeral train carrying Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington, D.C., where the senator was to be buried near his brother, President John F. Kennedy, at Arlington National Cemetery.

You never see a picture of the casket. Or the family in grief. The 20 photos in Fusco’s exhibit at the Norton Museum of Art are of people looking at the train cortege pass by. It’s a snapshot of small-town America at a moment of national crisis.

The trip took eight hours and Fusco shot 2,200 Kodachrome slides hanging out of the train-car window. The images capture a nation paying its respects, but they also capture a moment in time.

"I had no idea what was going on, no idea what it would be," says Fusco by phone from San Francisco. "I was a staff photographer at Look (in New York). I got to the office that day and my editor called me into his office. There was a High Mass and then they were going to put the coffin on the train.

" ‘Get on the train,’ he said.

"So I walked over to Penn Station, and asked where the train was. I went downstairs and went to the security people, showed my credentials. And the guy walked me in, said ‘Sit there and don’t move.’ "

Fusco sat there for an hour waiting for the train to start moving. During that time he thought about what he was going to do. The editor hadn’t said a thing about what he wanted. Fusco assumed that he was supposed to shoot the burial at Arlington. He was, he remembered, "absorbed by anxiety."

As the train began to pull out from the underground platform and came above ground, Fusco saw masses of people arrayed on the platforms and by the tracks, watching the train in silent witness.

"I was astounded by the people. 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. The train never went very fast; I could see things and photograph them pretty well. I was overwhelmed by the constant stream of people and the variety and mixture and visible pain and loss."

Fusco was born in 1930 in Massachusetts and was in the Signal Corps during the Korean War. After the war, he became a staff photographer at Look magazine specializing in social issues. He was there until 1971, then became a photographer for Magnum, where his most famous portfolio is a stunning group on the horror-show aftermath of Chernobyl.

That day on the train he was shooting with two Leicas and a Nikon.

"I was glad I had the Leica, because it was a range-finding camera, so when the light began to fade and I had to go to slow shutter speeds I could see what was going on, which I couldn’t with the Nikon. At the end, I was up to one- and two-second exposures; a lot of those are too fuzzy and don’t make any sense.

"When I finally saw the film, I thought, ‘You are a lucky bastard.’ Because the occasional blur and motion added an emotional aspect — the disintegration of life, the passage of time. My whole take on photography is to answer the question, ‘What are people feeling at that moment?’ "

The photographs have become far more famous in retrospect than they were at the time. Look was a biweekly, with a long lead time. By the time the magazine appeared, the photos couldn’t be played as a news story, so the magazine did a quick rundown of RFK’s life, and used just a single shot from Fusco’s 2,200 images to wrap the story up.

Look folded three years later.

The photographs, thankfully, are still here.

RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered Photographs by Paul Fusco

Through May 2 at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach. Information: (561) 832-5196 or norton.org