Sam Comen is a documentary photographer on a mission to tell the stories of everyday people.

This short film introduces Sam's project focusing on immigrant and 1st-generation American workers entitled ‘Working America,’ and rides-along with him as a large-scale public art installation is built and premiered in Grand Park, downtown LA’s central civic plaza as part of the Independence Day celebrations in July 2021.

Learn more about the Working America project and Sam's work: https://www.samcomen.com/working-america

Video Produced by Groundmaking

Directed and Edited by Reuben Herzl

Cinematography by Anai Garcia

Project Statement by Sam Comen:

Walking and driving every day in my native Los Angeles, I look around and see an economically thriving microcosm of a multiracial, immigrant America. The Armenian-American shoemaker, the Korean-American tailor, the Mexican-American machine operator working the late shift in the last zipper factory left in the country. As the great-grandson of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants, I can’t help but think of 2019 Los Angeles as a contemporary analog to my forebears’ late 19th Century experience in Chicago and Boston. Not long after arriving in the U.S., my great-grandparents did garment piecework and sold sewing supplies. A hundred years and three generations later, through hard work and access to education, they were able to forge a path to stability and wealth, affording me the privilege to pursue a career as an artist whose job it is to examine, reflect and comment on American culture.

It’s with my great-grandparents in mind that I’ve come to question how, in light of recent anti-immigrant rhetoric stoking wide debate across the U.S., their story might still be relevant today. Inspired by their work in the garment industry, I decided to consider immigrant-Americans and first-generation Americans through the lens of the “small trades,” re-engaging with the historical portrait approach that masters of photography Eugéne Atget, August Sander, and Irving Penn used to study national identity, work, and class in their own times.

To that end, I intend “Working America” to be a meditation on American belonging and American becoming. I’m curious if the national trope of hard work as a path to economic independence and inclusion is a reality. Is that path open to people-of-color? While I strongly believe the questions about race, work, and access that immigrants face in America today are both urgent and dire, my hope is for this series to, foremost, serve as a document of the lives and contributions these men and women continue to make to our country and to our collective experience.