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This is nonsense. One of the tests of whether you have violated a copyright is whether your production is "transformative." The Supreme Court defined two tests:

1. Has the material you have taken from the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning?

2. Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights, and understandings?

If it is parody - and this certainly is - then it is given broad latitude. And then there is the issue that Zimmerman is engaging in political speech which is the most hallowed of protected activities.

Like Warhol's Campbell Soup painting, Zimmerman's work is certainly transformative.

I won't enter the debate on artistic merit. It is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

You are correct, and in this case Zimmerman probably has an additional defense because the image depicts a public event which was photographed and recorded by multiple cameras, and perhaps even by Zimmerman himself. So there is little to no creative content in the photograph, as others have pointed out the exact same gesture from a similar viewpoint is caught in the video of the proceedings.

Granted, an exact copy or reproduction of the AP photograph would seem likely to infringe their copyright, but a work which is based on a gesture made by someone in public, and recorded simultaneously by many people seems to be a much more uncertain issue. Particularly when it may well be a commentary on the media, and the biases of AP itself.