Beauty in motion: three ballet photo books showcase companies on and offstage.

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Kansas City Ballet: The First Fifty Years By Wyatt Townley. Kansas City: Kansas City Star Books, 2007. 64 pages. $29.95

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San Francisco Ballet at 7S By Janice Ross. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007. 188 pages. $60

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In The Wings: Behind the Scenes at the New York City Ballet By Kyle Froman. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007. 128 pages. $35

There's nothing more fascinating than the inner workings of a ballet company. A tribe of young people--beautiful, long-limbed, high-strung, sequestered in a theater, caught up in a high-stakes performance game. Sleek creatures in practice clothes, working with total absorption on their "instruments." It's like a reality TV show that's so good, so pure-minded, you know it can never get on the air.

In place of this never-to-be-realized TV series, we have three picture books--little, middle-sized and large--that open windows onto three different ballet companies. And each one does it from a particular perspective. In the small and satisfying In the Wings: Behind the Scenes at the NYCB, Kyle Froman, senior member of the corps de ballet, shows us his working environment in a charming sequence of photographs. Along with the pictures, he walks us (in a nicely straightforward text) through a day in his NYCB life. We get shots of company class, the massage room, rehearsals, dressing rooms--and some light-flooded midperformance shots, angled from the wings.

Not all the pictures are exquisite compositions; some are workaday. But taken in sequence, they offer a documentary in stills, like one of those Depression-era federal projects that records the life of a factory. You end up impressed with the very act of picking out details from the blur of the humdrum: the gnarled strong hands of master physical therapist Marika Molnar digging into a dancer's back; the intent face of Sean Lavery rehearsing a pas de deux. Then, you turn the page to find a sudden mix of light and shadow, action and tension, that has fixed itself in an indelible image--Rebecca Krohn's light-struck profile, turned away from a crouching Sebastien Marcovici.

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The other two books are trickier productions, anniversary books, celebrating, respectively, the 50th birthday of the Kansas City Ballet, and the 75th of the San Francisco Ballet. Such books are always problematic--they are supposed to be both objective and celebratory. And their texts all too often seem damped down by the demands of officialese.

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What a surprise, then, to find in Kansas City Ballet: The First Fifty Years, a snappy, relaxed little text that seems to match the physical book, a slim affair smaller than an old-fashioned LP. The reader notes this early on, when the acknowledgments thank someone "for his bad karma" and someone else "for his good counsel." The acknowledger, author Wyatt Townley, listed on the back flap as poet, essayist, former dancer, and yoga teacher, uses wit and high spirits to enliven what could have been a solemn chronicle of the company's three phases: under ballet pioneer Tatiana Dokoudovska (sister of Vladimir); company-builder Todd Bolender; current artistic director/innovator William Whitener. And even if the pictures, grainy black and whites alternating with generic performance colors, aren't so snappily showcased, the book seems to conjure up the mood of the whole Kansas City enterprise: easy, smart, quick, unpompous, ideal for sleek, professional-looking dancers who meet your eyes in these pages.

The third book is the big production. It's squarish, it costs $60; its lustrous matte-black cover displays a spotlit pas de deux pair (Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith) reaching upward from the title ("san francisco ballet at seventy-five"), which is printed in toney lower case.

This is high design. Stunning full-page photos, lusciously reproduced, put the reader smack inside a rehearsal, or right on the stage among near life-sized bodies, who seem to float in the book's lustrous black palette. The text is relegated to discreet white-page sandwich-fillings that don't encroach on the world of the photos. Actually it's a fine text, by dance writer Janice Ross, not mischievous like Townley's, but intelligent, informative, historically accurate and full of quotes. If there's a hint of overblown piety here about the company's recent history ("SF Ballet ... was reborn on August 1, 1985, when Helgi Tomasson became its fourth director ..."), one must remember that SFB already did a glossy gold book for its 50th.

But wait a minute (you're leafing through the book)--a lot of these photographs are very good. They have depth; they show a high pitch of kinetic tension, molded by light and shadow; and a kind of up-to-date human warmth. Amid the movement drama and the baths of light, the dancers emerge as what they might be in real life: emotional, expressive people. Ruben Martin in profile, ready to lift an intently focused, front-facing Sarah Van Patten, her arm around his shoulder, her thigh in his hand, is a shot so generous, respectful, and warmly familiar, that it brings a reader to quick tears. Who might he the photographer? You search through the book, almost in vain. On the second-to-last page, a small list credits most of them to Erik Tomasson.

Yes, he's Helgi Tomasson's son. Not on staff, but a regular contract photographer--and a guy who grew up with this stuff.

Of all the gifted observers who worked, via these books, to do honor to the dancers, it's the previously unknown (to me) Erik Tomasson who emerges the hero.

Elizabeth Kendall is a dance critic and at work on a book about Balanchine's early life in Russia.