Leo Friedman, whose photograph of an ebullient Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert as lovebirds chasing down a Manhattan street became the enduring emblem of the musical “West Side Story” and the signature image of a career spent taking pictures of actors in action, died Friday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 92.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his son, Eric.

Friedman was a ubiquitous presence in and around New York theaters in the 1950s and 1960s, a peak period of Broadway glamour that coincided with the expanded professional use of 35 millimeter photography, which made still pictures better able to depict movement.

Friedman, whose ambition as a boy had been to act, made it his specialty to capture actors in rehearsal or in performance or in motion for his camera — in other words, acting.

A freelancer, he shot for magazines and newspapers, for press agents and producers. Often, when hired to take the official photographs of a show, he’d be an audience of one as the actors, after a full performance, would run the show backward for him, scene by scene.

By his son’s count, Friedman photographed more than 800 shows, including “Silk Stockings,” “My Fair Lady,” “Barefoot in the Park,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Cabaret” and “Coco.”

He shot Laurence Olivier hoofing in “The Entertainer,” Barbra Streisand’s Broadway debut in “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” Lucille Ball marching with a bass drum in “Wildcat,” Sammy Davis Jr. mugging behind a hat during a photo call; Richard Burton as Hamlet and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, smooching on the set; Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse, back to front in a dancers’ clinch in a rehearsal studio, their cigarettes symmetrically poised between their lips; and a dazzling Lena Horne in a white dress during a production number from “Jamaica.”

In one especially remarkable shot, he caught Eli Wallach, having been tossed by Zero Mostel in the 1961 production of Ionesco’s absurdist comedy “Rhinoceros,” in midair, his arms outstretched, his feet splayed and flying upward, the sole of one shoe pointed directly at the camera.

“Eli Wallach is flying through the air, and I just clicked that shutter and I got him right in the center of the whole thing with Zero pushing him,” Friedman said in a radio interview this year. “That’s a really great picture.”

The “West Side Story” shot, which became the cover of the cast album, came after Friedman had tried several settings and ended up along a row of tenements on West 56th Street.

“I made a mark on the street, and I said to Carol: ‘I want Larry chasing you up the street. When you hit that mark, don’t look at me down here, look up, with your head up,” he recalled. “And that’s what I took.”

Friedman, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, was born in Brooklyn in 1919.