Martha Joan Swope was born in Tyler, Texas on February 22, 1928. After a year at Baylor University, she was accepted at the School of American Ballet. She left Texas to pursue a dance career. In 1957, she was invited by Jerome Robbins, a fellow amateur photographer, to shoot rehearsals of West Side Story. One of her pictures appeared in Life magazine.
She was still hoping to become a dancer when Lincoln Kirstein, who ran the school and was general director of City Ballet, pulled her out of class one day to offer her a job recording the company's work in pictures. She became an official photographer first for New York City Ballet and then for other dance troupes. By 1978, she was photographing 60 to 70 percent of the Broadway roster. She closed her studio in 1994.
She received a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater in 2004 and a lifetime achievement award from the League of Professional Theater Women in 2007. Her photographs appeared in several books including Baryshnikov on Broadway: Photographs, Mourka: The Autobiography of a Cat, Physics and the Art of Dance, and What They Did for Love: The Untold Story Behind the Making of A Chorus Line. She died from Parkinson's disease on January 12, 2017 at the age of 88.
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