This is us, seeing us. From either side of the frame. While still—like light alighting upon form, form before the hazy memory of a garden—some distinctions emerge.

Yet, to what end these distinctions, when a ghutra assumes the structure of carved stone? When children’s skin shows starlit as the heavens? When eyes challenge as they wonder? When shadow understudies distance; not someone’s weary idea of darkness—but distance: that which rhymes with time as innocence does faith?

Here: these photographs make-to hold time. Hold as in embrace. Us holding us. A teeming garden we are. And in this time, we hold onto faith. Who you see here, is our Now and our soon-come Future. These children show us the distance between innocence and faith, a distance so slight a girl holds it in her resting hands. So slight a distance it balances between the tilt of a boy’s shoulders. Who we hold here helps us see what we can- not without faith—the future.

Remember the future? How it held both challenge and wonder? How you could see it via the lens of faith. Can you see it?

We do.

We do.

It’s here.

Statement by author and poet Douglas Kearney

Presented by THE BUREAU

The Bureau is a multidisciplinary creative media studio. We envision, create, and curate visual narratives to weave the thread of our collective histories. Art, as an expression of love, provides one of the few avenues in which the imagination can be completely unbound. As such, in an era of injustice, it must remain a totem of truth; one that demands an exercise of imagination and that envisions a future in which the principles of righteous- ness, morality, and the sanctity of human potential reign central.

Our team includes visual artists, designers, teachers, producers, editors, lawyers and poets.

Bobby Rogers and The Bureau Capture The Innocence of Faith — Mpls.St.Paul Magazine Nov. 15, 2021 article