RUSSIA

Nikolai Ignatiev was born in Moscow, July 22, 1955. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of International Relations (MIMO) in 1977, specializing in Mid-Eastern Economics and Persian Language.

Ignatiev served in the Soviet Army in Afghanistan as a military interpreter from 1977 to 1979. He was editor of Persian in Moscow's Progress Publishing House.

Ignatiev took up photography in 1982 and had his first published picture in Newsweek in 1984. Assignments then followed from Newsweek, Time and the Moscow bureau for Stern. In 1987 he emigrated to Britian and joined Network Photographers in London. In 1988 his first picture story for Life magazine on the Russian Orthodox Church was published. Although based in Britain, he returns regularly on assignments for Stern, Life, Der Spiegel, London Sunday Times Magazine, Observer, The Independent, L'Express, Germany's Geo, Telegraph, Zeit and other magazines.

In 1993 he married Juliet Butler, a British freelance journalist, and they have three children.