The White Horse with Wings

Essay by Noah Sneider

She lies still. Her eyes have been shadowed. A smile is poised on her lacquered lips. Her pink cloak has been pulled snug to her chin. She is beautiful. A bereft man in a black leather jacket, hunched and heavy, lowers his head beside her. A grey-haired man with distinguished wrinkles scowls across her. A black shawl holds down the disheveled hair of a weeping woman who gazes upon her. She is dead.

In ancient times, the Donbas was a no man’s land, a sprawling steppe known as the “wild field” (dikoe pole). The Cossacks came to roam there, trading control of the region with Tatars from the Crimean Khanate. In the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire arrived. But it was only with the discovery of coal that the modern Donbas began to take shape. In 1869, an Englishman called John Hughes built a steel mill in what would become the regional capital, Donetsk; initially they named the town for him: Yuzovka. Peasants from around the Russian Empire flocked to the factories. Industry became the lifeblood of the Donbas. “The soil is as black as the coal they take from it,” one European traveler wrote in 1908.

In the spring of 2014, masked men appeared in the streets of Donetsk, seizing buildings, building checkpoints, pointing weapons. Just months before, a revolution had swept the former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, from power in Kyiv; Russia had annexed Crimea, swiftly and nearly bloodlessly as the world stood by in shock. In the Donbas, however, blood spilled early and often. As the masked men took power there, they declared themselves "People's Republics". Some came from abroad, from Russia, but many simply crawled out of the mines and traded their pickaxes for firearms. Their crusade ran on a noxious cocktail of festering grievances, crippling poverty, and the potent propaganda that emanated from television sets tuned to Russian stations. The war has left more than 13,000 dead and millions more displaced. Children have learned to distinguish between rockets and mortars, incoming and outgoing fire, like they might, in a more peaceful time, learn the difference between a violin and a cello. The frontline now cuts through the black soil. Donbas has again become a dikoe pole.

He lies still. His eyebrows are so faint as to be nonexistent. Tufts of hair pad his misshapen head. Heaps of carnations and roses, blue, red and pink, conceal his body. He is normal. A silver-haired man in a black pinstripe suit cannot face him. A white-haired woman in a blue polka-dot blazer reaches out towards him. Behind him, a door opens onto a porch of wooden green windows. He is dead.

Many photographers, confronted with the suffering of war, gravitate towards graphic frames that capture a raw reality. Their pictures show the gory horrors of combat, the maimed mothers and furious fathers that fill all conflict zones.  They can be found haunting battle sites like vultures, hovering in search of the dead. In one of Hoffman's most evocative images they can be seen roaming a street strewn with shrapnel, cameras slung across their necks. One aims at a bombed out bus; another stalks the body of a man splayed face-first on the pavement. His innocent blood has stained the street. Wrinkles crease his face. A shopping bag still hangs in his hand. A woman wrapped in a thick fur coat seems to be seeking to escape beyond the edge of the frame. The composition acts as a mirror onto the strange alchemy that turns suffering into its representation.

In the images gathered here, Brendan Hoffman pursues a different approach. Rather than racing to shock, he seeks to illuminate the worlds that unfold beyond the front. His pictures portray the humans who endure the war and the landscapes that are shaped by it. He captures the chaotic poetry of a crowd arrayed around a vat of soup at a makeshift field canteen. The bespectacled man with the blue tin bowl is also a fighter. Hoffman peers into the sunflower fields from the vantage point of a rescue worker scouring the ground for bodies after the tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. He is armed—with a stick and a bit of white cloth to mark the locations of his morbid discoveries. Hoffman sees the profound dignity of a woman who has donned a white dress and sleek flats to tramp through the rubble. She is framed, appropriately, by crooked timber.

Hoffman trades the realism of combat for subtly surreal scenes that reveal the unreal that is the real reality of war. In one such picture, two white swans cruise a foggy reservoir, their backs to a block of bombed-out buildings. They seem to inhabit a world devoid of human presence, yet shaped by human destructiveness. Or perhaps it is the swans who are fighting here, raining fire when they flap their wings, and spitting shells from their orange beaks. In another, a blonde woman clutches a tiny dog and waits outside a car upon which a Kalashnikov rests. She looks away, down the overgrown road, while the dog stares straight at the viewer. He is telling something; only the dogs know when an earthquake is coming. Finally, a bearded man in a black bow-tie, tuxedo and top hat rides a white horse adorned with wings. War is the cruel trick of failed magicians prancing in the dark.

He lies still. His forehead glistens in the glare. His nose is a mountain. His telnyashka peeks out from under his camouflage uniform. Is he monstrous? A row of crew-cut soldiers in bandanas and combat gear raise rifles beside him. A shaggy-hair woman in a cheetah-print t-shirt reaches out to touch him. A young boy peeking through the crowd looks at him wistfully. He is dead.