The Art of the Daguerrotype (Viking, £20) contains 65 of these exquisite old photographs.

"He shot exquisite, iconic photographs," said Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, a magazine to which Mr. Ritts contributed dozens of cover images.

The rooms of the school were lined with large windows filling them with light, making a perfect setting for McGee's exquisite photographs of the aspiring dancers.

It was an exquisite photograph, head and shoulders in profile, perhaps taken with a telephoto lens.

In exquisite photographs of plants, Blossfeldt traced decorative motifs back to their sources in nature.

The other is an exquisite photograph of a wax tableau of Vermeer's "Music Lesson" at Madame Tussaud's in Amsterdam.

The personal drama of Eleanor Roosevelt's life also unfolds with unflinching clarity in the text and in the exquisite photographs that accompany it.

The new book is titled "On Boxing," published by Dolphin/Doubleday, with exquisite photographs by John Ranard.

Not a bird stirs in Frances Allen's "Morning Grey" (1905-8), an exquisite photograph of small, triangular haystacks in a field on a misty morning.

And with Mr. Prinz's big and exquisite photographs, portraiture becomes a form of allegory.