When All Else Fails, Shoot the Zombies

Briefly stuck for a topic tonight and still with virtual piles of photos to examine from recent shoots, I could not but help turn my mind to the subject of writer’s block. This in turn led to the larger subject of creative frustration, and when I bring that topic up in the context of photography, it isn’t long before Washington, DC, enters the mix.

I have been to Washington many times in my life. It is an extraordinary city, overflowing with monuments to the people and ideals that have shaped this nation. And every time I go there intent on photographing those monuments, something comes up.

I think every photographer is supposed to have that one amazing story of their nightmare shoot. The camera fell over just as the Sasquatch ran by carrying a cage of live passenger pigeons. The battery died just as the golden light struck on the world’s rarest flower.

Or, in my case, zombies attacked.

They gathered on the National Mall at the Washington Monument. I didn’t count them, but there were certainly more than a hundred; an extremely large crowd of ambulatory dead folks, all of whom seemed intent on storming the city and standing up for their general principles (this seemed to involve eating brains).

I had heard of zombie crawls or zombie marches in the past, but I had never quite wandered into one. As the light above demonstrates, it was that magic time of afternoon when a madcap display of beauty and nuance plays out on the facade of a thousand striking monuments. But the zombies were ready to march, and I really had no choice.

Two hours. Two solid hours, I tell you.

Two solid hours of this:

and this:

and this:

I followed them for miles as I caught their shambles on my digital camera. I was continually impressed by how each zombie had his or her own personality, how they almost all stayed in character relentlessly, and how the police let the whole absurd thing go on harmlessly as zombies mobbed sidewalks and occasionally wandered into traffic.

I saw teenage girls shriek and grown men prepare to punch the first person to touch them. I saw the zombies put on a show, and saw the people come up to their windows in homes, hotels and restaurants to watch.

Through it all, I also got to see the fun the zombie marchers had with each other, enjoying a general night on the town dressed up as someone dead.

In typical Washington fashion, the zombies even had their own lobbyists, there to help prepare the sidewalks for their arrival, keep them on the correct path and allow them fresh kills, every once in a while.

It was more fun than I had seen anybody have collectively for quite a long time, and I even fell in with a group of photographers who could commiserate with me about the absurdity of the antics we were watching – and our own absurdity for going along with it.

And, when all was said and done, I even squeezed off a picture of a monument.

Sometimes in photography, you just have to take the victories where you can find them.