Henry Leutwyler: Misty Copeland centers on a sustained encounter between the Swiss-born, New York–based photographer and one of American ballet’s defining contemporary figures. Conceived as a collaboration rather than a conventional celebrity portrait or straightforward record of dance technique, the book considers Copeland in several registers at once: performer and individual, public persona and cultural icon. Its subject is not only what the ballerina can do, but how identity is shaped before a camera.

Copeland’s history gives that inquiry particular weight. Raised in San Pedro, California, she began studying ballet at thirteen, after a childhood marked by severe economic insecurity. Her progress was unusually rapid: within months she was dancing en pointe, and little more than a year after her first class she was performing professionally. In 2015, she became the first African American woman appointed principal dancer in the American Ballet Theater’s seventy-five-year history. That institutional milestone forms an essential context for photographs concerned with both personal presence and public meaning.

Leutwyler approaches this collaboration with long experience of ballet’s visible and hidden worlds. For years he photographed performances and backstage life at the New York City Ballet, work that culminated in his earlier Steidl volume Ballet. Here, however, the institution and ensemble give way to a concentrated exchange with one person. By holding Copeland’s artistry, biography, image and symbolic status together, the project resists reducing her either to technical accomplishment or to an emblem detached from the dancer herself.

Published by Steidl in 2023, the seventy-two-page hardcover has a deliberately focused scope. For collectors, its importance rests in the conjunction of dance photography, collaborative portraiture and a consequential chapter in American cultural history. It also offers a revealing counterpart to Leutwyler’s broader ballet work: a book in which sustained attention to a single subject becomes a way of examining performance, representation and historical change.