Mid-Week Intermission Artist Edition: Tamir Kalifa, Photojournalist and Musician
Scrolling past heavy, complex headlines each day can make stories blur together. With a fast-paced news cycle where tragedy becomes routine, it’s easy to forget that each headline represents real people.
Photojournalist Tamir Kalifa has spent years working close to those moments, witnessing the human impact beyond the articles. Through compassionate visual storytelling, his work asks us to pause, look closer, and remember the people at the heart of the story.
Long Center: Welcome to Mid-Week Intermission! We usually like to ask folks for a song to go with their interview – anything come to mind? Maybe a song off Witness?
Tamir Kalifa: I’m choosing the song “Jackie’s Rock,” written about being asked by the family of Jackie Cazares, who was killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, to take a painted rock to Paris, France, in her honor in 2022. The simple request became one of the most meaningful experiences of my career. Jackie’s family joined me in the studio when we recorded the song and Jazmin, Jackie’s older sister and a gifted singer, sang harmonies.
LC: We’re so excited about your upcoming show at the Long Center. Can you share a little about yourself for our readers who might be unfamiliar?
Tamir Kalifa: I’m a longtime Austin photojournalist and musician. I’ve been photographing around Texas, the U.S. and internationally for The New York Times, Texas Monthly and others for over a decade – all while playing music in Austin bands. My career has taken me from documenting hurricanes, gun violence and politics in America to covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In between assignments and projects, I also played accordion, piano and guitar in the orchestral indie-rock ensemble Mother Falcon and toured with them for years. This new project, Witness, is the first time I’ve brought my photographs and music together.
LC: How did you get into photojournalism, specifically covering sensitive subjects impacting individuals and communities?
Tamir Kalifa: My path into photojournalism started early. My father was a video cameraman for CNN when I was growing up in Kensington, Maryland, in the 1990s. I remember watching the nightly news with him and feeling a sense of awe as the President of the United States spoke directly into my dad’s camera from the Oval Office. I loved history, and his work placed him inside the rooms where it was being made. He inspired me to pick up a camera at a young age and I never put it down.
I came to see photojournalism as both a way to experience history as it unfolds and a means of holding truth to power. Over time, as I covered more stories, I realized they felt more resonant when there was intimacy in the images — when viewers could recognize part of themselves in the lives of those depicted. I also began to notice a theme emerging from the most difficult assignments: when people are pushed to their limits, they can reveal an extraordinary resilience. I’ve tried my best to sensitively document individuals and communities facing the great issues of our time with the hope that compassionate visual storytelling can help foster an understanding and emotional engagement needed to move people toward action.
LC: Witness, your latest project, is a multimedia endeavor that combines your journalism with your music. What inspired this project and why did you feel it was important to pursue?
Tamir Kalifa: Music has been a constant companion throughout my life and writing songs about my experiences behind the camera became a way for me to process some of the most difficult moments I encountered. Over time, I began to feel frustrated by the unrelenting news cycle and how quickly stories can be consumed and forgotten. I wanted to create a space where these stories, some of them years old, could linger and resonate longer, grounded in the humanity that made them urgent in the first place.
Witness grew out of that. I wrote songs inspired by covering the Texas–Mexico border, the Pandemic, the El Paso shooting, natural disasters, and the families I came to know in the aftermath of the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde. It is easy to scroll past difficult headlines or avoid uncomfortable realities out of fatigue, fear, or numbness — I’m certainly guilty of that myself. Still, I believe art can help offer a way through, not by providing answers, but by opening hearts, encouraging empathy, and reminding us of how much we have in common.
I feel a sense of purpose and a profound responsibility in pursuing this work. I’m also immensely grateful to the individuals whose trust allowed me to witness some of the most difficult days of their lives. This project is, in part, a way to honor that trust and pay that gratitude forward by introducing audiences to these remarkable people.
LC: You’ve covered some pretty historic events, from natural disasters, global conflicts, and political campaigns. Is there a moment from your travels across the world that really struck you, or stands out as a career highlight (so far)?
Tamir Kalifa: Documenting Uvalde in the wake of the shooting has been the most formative experience of my career. What started as a breaking news assignment – one I reluctantly accepted – has evolved into a life-long project and commitment to the community that I have grown to care deeply for. I went to Uvalde because I had covered gun violence in the past and wanted to create a depiction of mass shootings that went beyond the familiar rituals of mourning in America, one that visualized grief, and the issue of gun violence, with care, compassion and patience.
As I attended school board meetings, protests, barbecues, graveside birthdays and more, I was moved by the quiet, ordinary courage the families demonstrated each day as they navigated the wilderness of grief. I lived in Uvalde full-time from March to May 2023 so I could be fully present and not miss these moments, which led to some of the most meaningful photographs of the project. While I have since taken on other assignments, Uvalde is a place I regularly return to. Witness, and the songs I wrote about Uvalde, are a continuation of my commitment to honoring the families and the memory of their loved ones.
LC: What’s something that you hope the audience might take away from Witness?
Tamir Kalifa: I hope Witness inspires audiences to reflect more deeply on what connects us as humans and what responsibilities we have to one another. I often return to something my former UT photojournalism professor Donna DeCesare once said to me, which I incorporated into the final lyrics of the album: “Pictures don’t change a thing, people do.”
LC: Anything you want to tease about your upcoming show in Austin on January 23?
Tamir Kalifa: One of the most meaningful parts of developing the performance of Witness is that I’ve done it in collaboration with Jazmin Cazares, Jackie’s older sister. She is a gifted singer and has become an integral part of the performance, singing not only on “Jackie’s Rock,” the song about her sister, but on other songs as well. I’m in awe of her talent and stage presence, but also her resilience and the way she and her family honor Jackie with every breath.
At the Long Center, we’ve always got a new partnership or something cool we know you’ll want to check out! Find and follow us @longcenter on your social media platform of choice, and we’ll see you real soon.
