74 www.foto8.com/bookshop Russia, despite its fascinating history

Motherland
Simon Roberts
Published by Chris Boot
www.chrisboot.com
£25
(192pp Hardback)
Russia, despite its fascinating history,
straddling Europe and Asia, east and west,
old and new, remains a country whose
heartlands are rarely visited by Westerners.
A lifelong fascination with this inspiring
place led photojournalist Simon Roberts
and his wife Sarah to pack their bags and
spend a year travelling around every nook
and cranny of the world’s biggest country,
covering over 75,000 km and crossing 11
time zones.
The book contains both landscapes and
portraits and Roberts has chosen to move
away from his usual “shoot-from-the-hip”
reportage style and concentrate on posed
portraits. The photographs are laid out
chronologically, following Roberts’ journey,
which began in August 2004 in Magadan in
the Russian Far East and ended in Moscow
in July 2005, and are interspersed with
quotes by literary and political figures that
have shaped Russia’s modern identity.
Many of the portraits are very intimate
and even a little exotic, such as the one of
wrestler Zhenya Seychov, from the “FarEastern Academy of Physical Education”
in Khabarovsk, giving the book an
anthropological feel. I am enthralled by the
photograph of the “Provodnista” (female
train attendant), Tatiana Hozhenest. Not
only does she smash the stereotype of the
drab Provodnista with a “drag queen”
style hairdo, she is also gorgeous. And I
can’t help but smile at the photograph
of a young Siberian teenager wearing an
Eminem hoodie (I wonder if they have
Asbos in Russia too); nowhere in this world
is immune to the reaches of American
popular culture. The “sexy” uniform worn
by the young student waitress who works
at the Café Pilot in Magadan, wouldn’t
look out of place on the pages of FHM
magazine and seems entirely at odds with
the rather sedate and bland interior of the
www.foto8.com/bookshop
café itself on the opposite page. Roberts
wanted to create a “visual statement about
contemporary Russia”, and indeed manages
to avoid the obvious and clichéd images of
drunk Russians falling over or drug-addled
youngsters in drab Siberian towns, with the
exception of one photograph of a distinctly
shabby woman and her worse for wear male
companion in the Jewish Autonomous
region of Birobidzhan, in the Russian Far
East. However, elsewhere, the frequently
posed portraits can sometimes feel staid and
repetitive.
Many of the landscape photographs
have a painterly quality to them; the frozen
warship in Murmansk, (which bares an
uncanny resemblance to German rock group
Rammstein’s Rosenrot album cover) and
Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky Port on Sakhalin
Island. These are also the most haunting
photographically and the ones where the
quality of the medium format camera he
shot them on can really be recognised. They
demand to be seen blown-up large and hung
in a gallery. Oddly enough the images of
destruction and displaced people in wartorn Chechnya are both the least interesting
and most stereotypical. These are images we
have all seen before in the news.
The book is well designed, with the
single page images just about big enough
to do them justice. The inclusion of a map
and list of the places Roberts visited at the
beginning, along with the clear captions
that accompany the images throughout,
help you to travel around Russia in your
mind and make a mental connection with
this vast country without ever having to
leave your living room. However I can’t
help feeling a little greedy in wanting to see
even more images, to know more about the
people’s lives. Maybe it is just too difficult
to cover such a vast topic in a 192 page
book. Lecturer, translator, and expert in
74
all things Russian, Rosamund Bartlett’s in
depth explanation of the meaning of the
word Rodina (Motherland) at the beginning
of the book is not only too heavy on the
literary history but also about five pages
too long. Roberts’ own story of his epic
journey (detailing the discovery that Sarah
was pregnant halfway through their trip!)
would have been a far more appropriate
and interesting introduction. Instead
this is tucked away at the back with the
acknowledgements.
While the “lifelong fascination”
with Russia I share with Roberts is not
necessary to appreciate the photographs
and the amount of work that went into this
compelling document, some knowledge of
Russia and its history will certainly make it a
more enjoyable experience. Lydia Bigley