Merce Me! Mikhail Baryshnikov, Best Ballet Dancer Ever, To Show Snaps of Modern Dance Company

“Come here to the corridor. This is all my photography,” said the legendary ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov the other day at his studio on West 37th Street. Hanging in the hallway were black-and-white portraits of “friends, artists, people I worked with, my kids, Richard Avedon, a great photographer …”

A slight man with excellent posture, Mr. Baryshnikov has dabbled in other art forms: guitar (“Obviously I’m doing something wrong,” he said of the Ace bandage on his left hand), acting (he played Carrie’s Russian lover, the artist Aleksandr Petrovsky, in Sex and the City’s final season) and, of course, photography (“for last 35 years,” he said). On Saturday, March 15, he will open a show at Vanity Fair photographer Mark Seliger’s 401 Projects in the West Village, featuring pictures of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

“I knew Mark socially,” he said of Mr. Seliger. “Luckily I don’t have to, you know, live off my work, and he is a professional, he’s working for a living. Also, he’s a good drinking companion. He’s funny at times. That’s more than enough for one human being.”

Mr. Baryshnikov said he was much more anxious about the upcoming photo exhibit—his second in New York—than he has ever been about a dance performance. “Although I’m very nervous performer when I perform onstage,” he said. “But I’m much more nervous about this, I’m driving all of them nuts.”

He pulled up some Merce photos on his Mac for the Transom: dancers leaping and twisting around the stage, equal measures blurry and sharply focused. “I actually run in front of the dancers, all the time switching the modes,” he said.

Initially, photography was a kind of journal-writing for Mr. Baryshnikov. “Every photograph, I remember the days. What’s happened before, what’s happened after. Somehow it’s a kind of therapy from early Alzheimer’s or something. Which I probably have, I’m afraid.” He was mindful that it’s a field crowded with refugees from other artistic genres, including singer Bryan Adams and designer Hedi Slimane. “Patti Smith, Lou Reed,” he added. “Tons and tons and tons.” Maybe because: “It’s a great shift from … from art which you slave all your life. It’s a great liberation.

“And look what [artist] Julian Schnabel did with his film,” he said. “Incredible, absolutely phenomenal. It has nothing to do with … or everything to do with what he does in his studio. Why? ’Cause that’s the itch. That internal ‘I’m not just a painter.’ Of course I could live without being a photographer, but I think if I can deliver a certain excitement, why not share it with people?”

Alas, he will not appear in this spring’s SATC movie. Indeed, “I never saw myself” in the series, he claimed. “I have seen the first two episodes, and then … I went to Europe and it was running for a couple months and then I arrived and it was done. And then I was flipping channels and suddenly I was speaking in Spanish. It was a Spanish channel. But the funniest thing was that in Russia, somebody was actually, uh …”—he searched for the proper word—“dubbed me in Russian!”