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Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was polling at 8 percent when photojournalist Jack Califano first reached out in March. Mamdani’s run was barely a blip then, but Califano sensed the swell of something shifting. He asked Mamdani’s communications director if he could follow the campaign behind the scenes (and on his own dime) for a long-term documentary project. They said yes, and over the next nine months, Califano embedded himself within Zohran’s team, photographing everything from union rallies to neighborhood canvassers to Ramadan iftars among aunties. He burned through more than 100 rolls of film in the process.

Jack and I first crossed paths on Chaand Raat—the post-Ramadan street festival that follows the final iftar—when we both found ourselves sprinting after Mamdani as he worked the crowd, moving with breakneck speed through Queens streets packed with Muslims reveling in the end of the fast. It was near midnight, and he was gliding between stalls and bodegas, activating the city’s Muslim community—roughly 9 percent of New Yorkers—with his now signature mix of warmth and urgency. Jack and I, cameras in hand, could barely keep up as Zohran disappeared into the blur of lights and music. In nearly every frame I took that night, Jack’s curly hair shows up somewhere in the corner.

That was March. By November, Mamdani had done what almost no one believed was possible. He defeated Andrew Cuomo by a wide margin and was elected New York City’s 111th mayor—and its first Muslim and South Asian one. Mamdani built a new coalition of working-class Black, Latino, and South Asian voters in the outer boroughs, alongside young progressives across Brooklyn and northern Manhattan, flipping neighborhoods that had once been Cuomo strongholds.

Through it all, Califano was there—often on a Citi Bike, sometimes in a mosque basement, always chasing the human moments that get lost in campaign coverage. Two days after Mamdani’s victory, we spoke about the photos that defined that journey, the energy of a movement few thought could win, and the side of Zohran Mamdani that most New Yorkers never got to see. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Aymann Ismail: You started following Zohran’s campaign long before most journalists took him seriously. What made you reach out in the first place? How did that play for access come together?

Jack Califano: I showed up to a Democratic Socialists of America event in Brooklyn Heights, took some pictures, and reached out to an old friend who put me in touch with Andrew Epstein, who was his campaign’s comms director at the time, and told him I wanted to follow the campaign in a long-form, documentary way. We got lunch afterward, and I pitched him on the idea.

I really wanted to do a behind-the-scenes look you can’t get from an assignment. Oftentimes an assignment is going to be for a day or a couple days. I knew that if I wanted my work to stand out, I had to dedicate an extensive amount of time to get a view of the campaign that no one else was going to have. I wasn’t backed by any publication, but I approached Andrew very early on and very explicitly with that idea. Even if Zohran only had a 10 percent chance of winning, it had potential to be really historic. And since he wasn’t high in the polls, I figured they might be open to letting someone embed like that.........

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