Marianna Volkova (b. 1946, Oranienbaum, USSR), an American photo artist of Russian descent and the wife of Solomon Volkov (the well-known musicologist and Joseph Brodsky’s biographer), was born in Oranienbaum, from which her family was deported during purges against the Leningrad Finns. Attended a school in Petrozavodsk. A Leningrad Conservatoire graduate, she emigrated to the USA in 1976. She took up photography at 19, and the first photo portrait she made was that of the composer Aram Khachaturian. Many American and European newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Der Spiegel and L’Europeo, published her works. Marianna Volkova authored ten photo albums, which were published in the USA and Russia. These include The World of Russian-American Culture: One Hundred Photo Portraits (with text by Boris Paramonov), Joseph Brodsky: the Portrait of a Poet. 1978-1996 (New York), Poets Lived There (with texts by Sergei Dovlatov) and The Elite: One Hundred Portraits of Russian Culture Figures (with text by Petr Vail). Her other books are Not Just Brodsky, Joseph Brodsky in New York and Yuri Lyubimov in America.
