Sam Comen

Sam Comen is a documentary photographer based in Los Angeles. As a native Californian, Sam has used his home state as a muse throughout his career. Thus leading him to creating his project, The Longest Shift, following the morbid marker of one year under the Covid-19 pandemic, infections and deaths in Los Angeles County.

This series The Longest Shift, focuses largely on Black and Latinx workers, often in jobs that expose striking societal inequities, examine the economic and social forces that shape our communities, their structures laid bare by a deadly pandemic.

Through Comen’s reverent portrayals of these workers’ in image and text, these works celebrate the subjects’ lives, contributions, and resilience. These photographs invite the viewer to reflect on the meaning of work in our society and the value of the labor we all rely on, in hopes of spurring more equitable conditions in a post-pandemic world.