Motherland is a remarkable photo-essay about contemporary Russia, photographed by Roberts when he undertook a year-long journey across the country between July 2004 and August 2005. Photographed fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Motherland is a comprehensive project that presents an intimate portrait of a unique and complex country. This is a significant and resolved body of work, in which the clichéd view of a poverty-stricken post-communist Russia is dispelled. Roberts presents a diversity of people, united in a shared confidence in their future against a backdrop of awe-inspiring landscapes. He successfully employs traditional documentary values with a contemporary approach to his image making. Motherland is, ultimately, an important photographic record about a place and people at a very particular point in time.