Tamir Kalifa Turns Tragic Experiences into Spellbinding Works of Art

In June 2018, Tamir Kalifa traveled to the southern border to cover the ongoing turmoil around immigration. There, the photojournalist spent time on the bridge between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, talking to people who had made the grueling trip from Honduras or El Salvador in search of a better life. He recalls standing in the darkness under the glow of streetlights with cars whizzing by as a family of five shared their story: The husband and wife had arrived on America’s doorstep to make a plea for asylum to display to their three children that there was a right and just way to do things. “We have no possessions, no money, no food, only hope,” the father told Kalifa.

Back in his house in Austin a few days later, emotions came pouring out of the photojournalist in a way he wasn’t quite expecting—as a song. Kalifa was no stranger to music, as he was a member of the orchestral pop band Mother Falcon for over a decade and knows how to play a range of instruments, including guitar, clarinet, saxophone, and accordion. But it was the first time in years that he had seriously contemplated making music.

The impromptu creation of that song was the beginning of a long journey that has resulted in a new album, Witness, which will be released Jan. 23. Along with the music comes an immersive multimedia live show, happening on the album’s release day at the Long Center, where Kalifa will perform the songs while projecting the images that inspired them.

Throughout his career working for renowned outlets—The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Texas Monthly, and others—Kalifa has pursued the globe’s most compelling and complex stories. From behind his lens, he has documented families reeling from gun violence, communities decimated by floods, and nations ravaged by war. Many of those harrowing images began to percolate into musical creations.

“It started just kind of as a way to process it and think about what I had seen,” Kalifa says. “I’ll never forget driving around the Big Island in Lower Puna, seeing the immense amount of steam and sulfur just bursting from the ground and these giant fissures in the volcano eruption.”

But over time, the photographer began to think about the art he was working on as an extension of the stories—another way to share them with new audiences. Plus, their personal and subjective nature helped render more complete views of situations that all too often are distorted by the polarizing effects of news cycles.

“It’s really important that stories go beyond the headlines, especially when you get to witness the day-to-day experiences of someone who is existing within these big moments of our time,” he says. In other words, the real-life people inside these events frequently get left out of the impersonal overviews that outsiders experience. “The song became like a way to tell their story and without letting it just gather digital dust on my hard drive.”

Ultimately, Kalifa arrived at nine songs written between 2018 and 2024 that cover key events like the aftermath of the 2019 Wal-Mart shooting in El Paso, the COVID-19 pandemic, Hurricane Harvey, and the conflict in Gaza. Musically, these folk-pop arrangements channel meditative moods by virtue of trembling strings, somber brass, uplifting melodies, and contemplative vocals.

Perhaps most notably, Kalifa addresses the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde. In the wake of the tragedy, the photographer traveled to South Texas immediately and eventually moved to the small city full-time for several months to get to know the families and community members who had lost loved ones to gun violence. In fact, it was his work in Uvalde that directly led to Kalifa winning the Mosaic Prize for Journalism, which came with a prize of $100,000, some of which was devoted to the creation of Witness.

One of the songs that came out of Kalifa’s experience in Uvalde, “Jackie’s Rock,” documents a heartrending moment shared with the family of 9-year-old Robb Elementary victim Jackie Cazares. When Kalifa visited Cazares’ grave, it was decorated with stones painted by friends and family members with words that commemorated her life. Jackie’s father, Jacinto, handed Kalifa a stone emblazoned with white painted letters that said “Paris,” in reference to his daughter’s lifelong dream to visit the European city. Three weeks later, Kalifa stepped off an airplane with a rock from the Nueces River tucked tenderly in his pocket. He had taken it from South Texas across the Atlantic to France, where found a suitable place to leave it near the Eiffel Tower.

After that, Kalifa’s relationship with the family continued as his work on the album unfolded. Jackie’s 18-year-old sister, Jazmin, sings harmony parts on the song about her sister, and Kalifa brought the whole family to New York City for a special performance at a photography festival in June of last year.

One recent composition that didn’t make it onto the album but has become part of the musician’s live performance uses an oud—an instrument that originated in the Middle East centuries ago. A predecessor to the medieval lute, it’s one of the oldest known stringed instruments in the world. Kalifa’s grandfather was born in Morrocco and worked as luthier, building and maintaining ouds. Some of those family heirlooms remained in his family but had fallen into disrepair—until this past summer, when Kalifa found someone who could restore it.

“When I held it for the first time, I felt full-body chills,” he recalls. “I felt a connection to my grandfather who died in 2005, and after covering Israel and Palestine for a significant part of my career, I finally felt like I had an instrument that could help me create music about that.”

There’s an undeniable physical rhetoric to the wordless oud composition performed by Kalifa, who was raised partly in Israel but has family ties to the Arabic world.

“It’s an instrument that has been shared by both Jews and Arabs throughout history,” he says. “And so that epitomizes the shared history and heritage that both Jews and Arabs have. But Israelis and Palestinians also have something very profound in common as well, and that is overwhelming trauma and grief.”

Kalifa’s choice to take up the oud is just one more way that he asks an audience to contemplate. “I have a plea, which is to open one’s heart and minds and to make decisions to look at these events from a place of compassion and empathy as much as from a place of justice and accountability.”

Photographs are reflections of reality, and ultimately that’s what Kalifa’s photographs and songs ask us to do—to stop and reflect. Taken as a whole, Witness is a deep and searching study of tragedy and resilience. It evidences the photojournalist’s keen sensitivity to the connections between people and their connection to the places they inhabit.

“I’m not seeking to tell anybody how to think or how to vote,” he says. “I’m just trying to, as best I can, offer the most compassionate depiction of some of the issues that I’ve documented in order to help them feel more personal and real for people.” In short, across a multitude of mediums, he has an extraordinary ability to make people feel seen.

Kalifa’s songs, just like his award-winning photography, take abstract events and distill them into crystal-clear portrayals of humanity. There’s an implicit argument here that one can find deeper understanding and more common ground just by pausing for reflection, simply by being a witness.