Today marks the birthday of stellar Broadway and dance photographer Martha Swope, who captured over 800 Broadway and Off-Broadway shows before her passing in 2017. Her enduring work, which permanently engraved the history of theatre and dance in the popular memory, earned her a Tony Award for Excellence in Theater in 2004. If you’ve seen any stage images at all from the 1960s-1990s, such as Evita, A Chorus Line, Annie or Shakespeare in the Park, you’re already familiar with her work.

Even if you’re not a Broadway buff, you’ll recognize her iconographic poster shot of John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever (yes, that was hers) or maybe you saw those omnipresent subway posters in the 1980s for the musical Cats.

For many ballet and modern dance enthusiasts, however, it is Swope’s dance photography that makes her a national treasure, and it is in the dance world where she got her start. Swope interrupted her own training as a dancer in the School of American Ballet in the late 1950s to pursue a career as a photographer. She thus captured the essence of dance from the other side of the camera, combining her knowledge of choreography with an aesthetic sensitivity informed by her love of dance. Her lens covered forty years of American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem, New York City Ballet, Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor and numerous other smaller companies.

The story of Swope’s beginnings as a professional photographer begins with ballet classmate Jerome Robbins asking her to photograph rehearsals of West Side Story in 1957, one of which was published in Life magazine. Lincoln Kirstein then invited her to shoot rehearsals for Balanchine’s Agon. In 1958 she travelled to Europe, where she photographed the Bolshoi Ballet and Van Cliburn in concert, which made it to the New York Times front page. She met Jose Quintero at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, and soon after began shooting rehearsals for the new Circle in the Square Downtown, including Our Town (1959) and Camino Real (1960). She eventually became the default house photographer for other theatre groups including the Roundabout, New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater and the WPA Theater, to name a few.

The images captured by Swope for a period of almost forty years are a virtual who’s who of some of the greatest actors on stage as well as composers (Stephen Sondheim), directors (James Lapine), choreographers (George Balanchine), dancers (Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland) and producers (Hal Prince) behind the scenes during rehearsals. Her collection is rounded out by additional coverage of operas, motion pictures and television, as well as circus and ice shows.

Please join us in celebrating Martha Swope’s birthday by browsing over 60,000 images from her extraordinary archive on permanent display in Digital Collections, which provides free access for artists, students, scholars and dreamers alike. Researchers can also access a guide to the entire archive of over one million prints, negatives and slides.

Special thanks to Camille Dee, processing archivist of the Martha Swope Archive, whose detailed finding aid and biographical notes provided invaluable background material for the preparation of this blog.