Inside the Santa Monica Pier's historic Merry-Go-Round building, 274 faces now look out from the walls — locals, cross-country travelers and international visitors who stopped for a few minutes in July to sit for photographer Sam Comen. The free exhibition, called “Afterglow,” opened this week and runs through September 30, offering what its creator calls a glimpse of an incredibly diverse, deeply personal and always changing America.
The show was made possible by Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs, and was created in collaboration with the Santa Monica Pier Corporation, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press. Comen operated an outdoor portrait studio on the pier and conducted brief sittings — paired with brief conversations with each participant — over three summer days in July 2026, photographing 274 people in all, the paper reports.
Why Comen Picked the Pier
Comen chose the Santa Monica Pier because it's a place where diverse people and journeys converge, according to the same account. The location carries its own symbolic weight: the pier sits where Los Angeles meets the Pacific Ocean and marks the western end of historic Route 66, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press. Comen said the resulting photographs and conversations reveal an incredibly diverse, deeply personal and always changing America — a framing that lands squarely in 2026, the year marking the Santa Monica Lookout describes as the U.S. Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Jim Harris, executive director and historian of the Santa Monica Pier Corporation, said the pier brings together people from across Los Angeles and around the world, per the Santa Monica Daily Press. Harris added that the portraits show the pier is defined by the stories, experiences and perspectives of its visitors, the paper notes. That civic mixing ground draws a genuinely massive crowd — overall annual visitor traffic at the Santa Monica Pier is estimated between 6 million and 12 million people, making it one of the most heavily visited oceanfront landmarks in Southern California, according to Pacific Park Newsroom.
A Photographer With National Reach
Comen's career spans 20 years, and he specializes in photographing human stories connected to American political and social issues, the Santa Monica Daily Press reports. His photographs are held by the Library of Congress, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs' Art Bank, and his work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery twice, per the same account. In 2019, he won Second Prize in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition for his portrait “Jesus Sera, Dishwasher,” drawn from his “Working America” series, according to the Chelsea District Library.
That series is part of a broader body of touring documentary work — “Working America” and “The Newest Americans” — which has reached more than 50,000 viewers across 26 venues nationwide since 2018, according to the Santa Monica Lookout. Comen has collaborated with civic institutions, labor unions, foundations and community organizations throughout his practice, per the Santa Monica Daily Press. He has ties to Santa Monica specifically, too: in March 2024, the city acquired his “Our Pico” portrait collection, a 17-photograph series documenting Pico Boulevard small business workers made with the Pico Improvement Organization, into its municipal Art Bank, according to the City of Santa Monica.
Inside a Landmark Building
The venue itself carries historic weight. The Merry-Go-Round building, historically known as the Looff Hippodrome, was built in 1916 by amusement builder Charles I. D. Looff and his son Arthur and was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1987, according to the Santa Monica Conservancy. The pier surrounding it has an even older civic backstory — it opened in 1909 as a municipal pier designed primarily to carry treated sewage pipes out into Santa Monica Bay, before an adjacent pleasure pier was added in 1916, according to LAist.
Art of Recovery, the city initiative funding “Afterglow,” was established during the COVID-19 pandemic and has distributed nearly $1 million across 105 grants to community artists and organizations, according to the City of Santa Monica. The program's economic stimulus mission arrives at a notable moment: Santa Monica drew 3.89 million total visitors in 2025, an 8% decline from 4.22 million in 2024 and less than half its 2017 peak of 8.71 million visitors, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press.
Reception Timed to Locals' Night
A reception for “Afterglow” is set for September 17, 2026, from 3:30 to 7 p.m., timed to coincide with the Santa Monica Pier's Locals' Night, a community programming series built around local arts, youth performances and regional musicians, per Pacific Park Newsroom. The exhibition itself is free and presented at 200 Santa Monica Pier, with hours running 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday through Sunday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday and Thursday, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press.
The carousel building has hosted public gatherings and performances before, including a 2018 staging of the theatrical work “An Illegal Start” inside the same space, as previously reported by Hoodline. More recently, the pier has also served as the backdrop for large-scale public activations, including a Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg-hosted World Cup event Hoodline covered in May. “Afterglow” takes a quieter approach, trading spectacle for still portraits and short conversations, but its ambition is no less sweeping: a snapshot of who passes through one Southern California landmark during America's 250th year.
