Robert Kennedy is Assassinated, Ambassador Hotel Busboy Juan Romero, 17, Kneels by Senator Robert Kennedy 5 - 1968

This photograph, taken by Boris Yaro, captures the moment after Robert Kennedy was shot. It’s all in black and white. There’s a body on the ground, and hovering over it is another figure, a busboy. I wonder what Yaro was thinking when he took this photograph? As an artist you're often weighing up whether or not to include something in the frame or not. What does the image need to be complete? What does it need to communicate? I can see that it is immediate, urgent, and documentary; like maybe he felt the need to capture an important moment in time as it unfolded, but there’s also something else happening here. The contrast is so high, and that adds to the starkness and the drama. The angles are strange and off-kilter, not quite centered, and that gives it a sense of uneasiness, of something being wrong. You can see the influence of Weegee here, and other photographers of the time. It's part of a long conversation between artists trying to make sense of the world. Photography, like painting, is always a way of trying to understand what’s going on around us, and of sharing that understanding with others.