While the walking dead were disappointingly absent in this photoblog, there were, still, strangely enough, zombies. I’ll have to call ZombieTime an activist photoblog, but that might give the wrong impression. The mysterious curator of this ezine has managed to make him or herself present at most major American protests in the last few years, documenting the various people that regularly attend them. But the photographer hits it from a seriously satirical angle, revealing how the modern day protest has become a strange pomo-smashup of every agenda running simultaneously. At the Anarchist Book Fair we find the scrotal inflation practitioners (okay, maybe that works). But in his documentation of a “Walk for Life” (pro-life rally), we find a large amount of swastikas on signs (attacking the right-wing, of course), and we also find communist groups, socialists, Cindy Sheehan fan clubs, the raging grannies, and a group called “code pink.” The site has a great way of minimizing the comments on the photos, and letting the confrontation that inevitably happens between these two groups unfold visually. The most creative political collage on the site has to be the recent Tookie Williams execution in California. Everyone showed up! Aside from the expected pro- and anti-capital punishment people, here’s a short list of attendees: a pro-Palestinian group, groups singing anti-gay chants at religious protestors, signs featuring Arnold as Hitler (Nazis imagery always makes an appearance), girls singing about orgasms, queers for Palestine, football team supporters, 9/11 coverup conspiracy theorists, people protesting the wrong execution and, of course, a GIANT GHANDI. It’s interesting how the modern protest, as documented by Zombietime, has become a mosaic of agendas banding together for one thing to give the appearance of being against something else. Depending on your political stance, some might be offended by the captions to the pictures, but they’re pretty easy to ignore when you’re staring at cat-woman beating up Bush in the back of the batmobile. I tell ya, this stuff will never get old! (James King)
www.zombietime.com