Ballet: Photographs of the New York City Ballet

Ballet: Photographs of the New York City Ballet is Henry Leutwyler's book of backstage pictures of the company, made over 30 days in the winter of 2012.

After four years of collaboration with the New York City Ballet and its choreographer Peter Martins, Leutwyler was given access behind the scenes. He photographed the dancers from the shadows of the stage, using only a 35mm Leica. Steidl's text places the project in the company's history: George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein co-created it in 1948. This is the second edition, a clothbound volume of 408 pages that Steidl issued in April 2015. The first came out in 2012, and Leutwyler showed the photographs at Foley Gallery in New York that year.

Leutwyler was born in Switzerland in 1961 and moved to Paris in 1985, where he worked as an editorial photographer. He has lived in New York City since 1995. His pictures have run in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal. His Steidl books include Neverland Lost: A Portrait of Michael Jackson (2010) and Document (2016).