Editor’s note: This story contains mentions of gun violence and loss.
As temperatures dropped and the skies opened up Friday evening, photojournalist Tamir Kalifa took the stage at the Long Center’s Rollins Studio Theater, leading an intimate journey through grief and resilience. “Witness,” Kalifa’s multimedia endeavor, premiered after nearly a decade in the making, adapting his experiences on the frontlines of tragedy into a performance that blended music, photography and unflinching honesty.
“I wanted to try to create a space where audiences could engage with journalism in a way that allowed for them to slow down and linger with these pieces and reflect on some of these issues,” said Kalifa, who graduated from UT’s journalism program in 2012.
“Witness” also released to Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music as an album on Friday and features nine original songs by Kalifa that process the difficult stories he’s covered throughout his career. Three songs memorialize victims of the May 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where Kalifa stayed for a year while putting together a story for the New York Times.
“Grieving patterns do not align with deadline cycles,” Kalifa said. “If we are to visualize the magnitude of grief, like what Uvalde endured, then it must be done with care, compassion and patience.”
Jazmin Cazares, whose sister, Jackie, lost her life at the age of nine in the Robb Elementary shooting, said she remembers Kalifa showing respect to the families of the 21 victims at a time when many in the media did not. Kalifa wrote “Jackie’s Rock” after Jackie’s father asked him to take a rock decorated with Jackie’s name and a painting of the Eiffel Tower on a trip to Paris, where Jackie had always wanted to go.
On Friday, Cazares, who sang on the studio recording of “Jackie’s Rock,” joined Kalifa’s band as a backing vocalist, encouraged by resounding support from Uvalde families who drove to Austin for the show.
“Doing this project and memorializing my sister in this way is just so bittersweet,” Cazares said.
Along with the Uvalde shooting, “Witness” chronicles the time he spent with families at the United States-Mexico border, the overwhelming humanity he saw during the Kīlauea eruption in Hawaii in 2018, the recovery of one survivor of the 2019 Walmart shooting in El Paso and the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
During Friday’s live performance, Kalifa, who was visiting family in Israel on October 7, 2023, played the oud while photos he took from the war in Gaza flashed behind him. Molly Cumming, a UT alumna who attended the performance on Friday, said the show brought her to tears.
“It’s a reminder that these stories don’t go away,” Cumming said. “We have to remain engaged, especially now. It’s so easy to bury our heads in the sand.”
Kalifa took the stage dressed in black. He sang and spoke with brutal honesty about tragedy for more than 90 minutes. Still, rays of hope shone through the devastation.
“To be crushed is to reveal what’s best in each of us,” Kalifa sang. “Let’s pick up all the pieces to a world we can still touch.”
