‘The Longest Shift’

Tragedy tempered the moments in which these portraits were made. In December 2020 and January 2021, as the country neared the morbid marker of one year under the Covid-19 pandemic, infections and deaths in Los Angeles County had reached a dramatic peak.

It was in this context that I traveled throughout L.A. to document workers – deemed essential – who were thrust to the front lines and asked to keep on the job while the rest of society sheltered at home.

This body of work, focusing largely on Black and Latinx workers, often in jobs that expose striking societal inequities, examines the economic and social forces that shape our communities, their structures laid bare by a deadly pandemic.

Through reverent portrayals of these workers’ in still and motion portraits, this essay celebrates the subjects’ lives, contributions, and resilience. It invites 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.

‘Working America’

Inspired by my Eastern European Jewish immigrant great-grandparents’ work in the garment industry, I set out to question how, in light of anti-immigrant rhetoric during the Trump years, their story might still be relevant today.

I worked in the spirit of the “small trades,” re-engaging with the historical portrait approach that my artistic forebears used to study national identity, work, and class in their own times.

To that end, I intend this work 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 for immigrants, especially for immigrants-of-color. My hope is for this series to serve as a document of the lives and contributions these men and women continue to make to our country and to our collective experience.