Probably the first photographic image of a zombie was taken by Zora Neale Hurston, an African American anthropologist and writer. The image was taken in the mid-1930s during a research trip to Haiti. Hurston had previously studied death and trance rituals in the Deep South.
“Here in the shadow of the Empire State Building, death and the graveyard are final. It is such a positive end that we use it as a measure of nothingness and eternity. We have the quick and the dead. But in Haiti there is the quick, the dead, and then there are zombies.”
(Zora Neale Hurston: Tell My Horse. Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, 1938, S. 179)