When Simon Roberts sent me a copy of his new book Motherland, I thought that instead of writing a review I could talk to him about the book. I am glad he agreed to participate.
Jörg Colberg: You set out to travel across Russia for quite an extended period of time. Did you have an idea about the photo project in your mind when you started the trip?
Simon Roberts: There were two reasons for choosing Russia. Firstly it was somewhere that had always fascinated me. I studied Human Geography at the University of Sheffield and a number of the courses I took looked at social, cultural and economic issues surrounding Russia and the former Soviet Union. Secondly, while there had been a number of important photo documentaries on Russia in the last decade, many were produced around the time of the fall of Communism, and tended to concentrate on themes surrounding disintegration and decay. I felt that the dialogue was very one sided and that the debate had moved on in recent years but photographic representations hadn’t. I was interested in exploring a different side to Russia and regions that had often been overlooked.
I’d only been to Russia once before, passing through in 1994 to visit my wife, Sarah, who was studying there. We decided that now would be a fascinating time to return, fifteen years after the fall of Communism. After researching the project for 18 months, we left London in July 2004 and spent the next 12 months travelling over 75,000km from the federation’s Far East, through Siberia to the Northern Caucasus, the Altai Mountains and along the Volga River. We finished in Moscow in July 2005.
The idea of using the concept of Rodina (Russian for motherland) for the framework of the book came about as I was traveling. The national pride among the Russians I met was much more powerful than I’d ever experienced before, especially when compared to Rule Britannia or patriotism in America. It was somehow less arrogant, slightly sorrowful and much more spiritual, almost a painful yearning of the heart. The majority of Russians we met were intensely proud of their homeland’s beauty and its achievements and I wanted the tone of the work to explore these themes.
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