Brendan Hoffman • Photographer Profile

After months of buildup and half-hearted attempts at diplomacy, Russia launched a full, unprovoked invasion of it’s neighbor Ukraine on February 24, 2022. On the false pretexts of safeguarding its own security from NATO expansion and countering Ukrainian radicals, Russia initiated the largest ground war in Europe in decades.

Since protests in Kyiv drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power in February 2014, Eastern Ukraine has been convulsed by a rebel insurgency, inflamed by Russia, that has evolved into a full-fledged war centered in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk – an industrial region known as Donbass.

The Eastern European country of Belarus is known primarily for its autocratic leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who since 1994 has presided over the former Soviet state as if the USSR had never collapsed. Its economy is largely state-run and political freedoms essentially nonexistent, although a thriving IT industry and relatively low levels of corruption have brought a modicum of comfort to the growing middle class in the capital city of Minsk. It remains a geopolitical fulcrum, shrewdly playing close ties with Russia against Western desires for openness.

The Indus River and its tributaries provide crucial fresh water to both India and Pakistan, yet the future of this shared resource is increasingly precarious as a result of climate change, population growth, and bitter political divisions.

Nagorno-Karabakh is a small mountainous territory in the South Caucasus caught in limbo. Officially part of Azerbaijan, it has functioned as a region of Armenia since the two former Soviet republics fought a bloody war over the land as the Soviet Union fell apart. A 1994 ceasefire brought an end only to official hostilities. In early April 2016 fighting once again erupted for four intense days, killing dozens on each side.

On October 11, 2018, the Ecumenical Patriarch announced its support for Ukraine’s effort to create an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, moving out from under Moscow’s patronage for the first time since 1686. It’s a move with long historical roots that was finally realized due to current political tensions, and it has incensed the Russian Orthodox Church leadership, who may break from the church leadership in Istanbul in Christianity’s biggest rupture in a thousand years.

The Beating of the Heart is a dispatch from a place where I both do and do not belong. In 2011 I began photographing in the small town of Webster City, Iowa. Over the next several years I visited more than a dozen times, photographing life in Webster City as well as my own experiences and reactions to it, trying to better understand the people I now consider friends. These photographs are the accumulated record of my journeys, revealing the degree of my bond.

As winter settled over Ukraine in late 2013, Kyiv exploded into crisis. President Viktor Yanukovych announced that he would abandon a promised trade and partnership agreement with the European Union in favor of support from Russia. Thousands of people took to the streets in protest over a culture of official corruption which they feared would only deepen amid closer ties to Russia.

Five years after the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 250,000 people, Haiti continues to struggle. Despite the tremendous resources and ideas brought to bear, intended once and for all to set right Haiti’s development and governance challenges, many of the issues that have plagued the country for decades, including corruption, violence, dependence on foreign assistance, and poor infrastructure, remain deeply entrenched. Hopes raised high have fallen, replaced in the minds of many Haitians by bitter resentment that they have once again been exploited and forgotten.

On July 17, 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile as it passed over eastern Ukraine en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board. Immediate suspicion, backed up by on-the-ground evidence and analysis from Western intelligence agencies and international investigators, implicated the pro-Russian rebels currently fighting a war in the region, who seemingly received the weapon directly from Russia.