Over the course of his long career, Ansel Adams (1902–84) confronted the vast landscapes of the American West with a shrewd innocence of eye. His black-and-white photographs, whether of Yosemite in winter or of the Sierra Nevada at sunrise or even of a shivering stand of aspens in a Colorado canyon, capture those vistas as if they were being glimpsed for the first time. That this was an illusion, the result of technical mastery as well as of artistic design, takes nothing away from the grandeur of his images; if anything, it enhances the effect. Adams drew on the resources of illusion to fix a fleeting instant of perception with the utmost exactitude.

That sophisticated freshness of view graces almost every page of “Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs” (Little, Brown, 440 pages, $40), edited by Andrea Stillman. Ms. Stillman, who worked with Adams and has published several previous compilations of his prints, here gives the fullest overview of his achievement, beginning with the first (astonishingly fine) snapshots Adams took of Yosemite with his Kodak Brownie Box camera in 1916, when he was 14 years old, and continuing through every major stage of his career up to 1968. The result is a magnificent book. Though no reproduction can convey the beauty of an original Adams print, the plates here give an accurate sense of the subtle tonalities of his greatest work. By grouping them in five chronological sections, each prefaced by a succinct biographical essay, Ms. Stillman enables us to trace Adams’s development from early virtuosity to sustained accomplishment. A useful concluding section of “thumbnail images” provides documentary information, often in Adams’s own words, on individual prints.

As the progression of images makes plain, Adams’s genius was always for landscape. Ms. Stillman includes a number of portraits of Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Georgia O’Keeffe and others (his 1927 portrait of the poet Robinson Jeffers is especially beautiful). But on the whole, Adams’s portraiture lacks that sympathetic quickness of discernment a convincing portrait demands; we never sense the person beneath the pose. Like a landscape, a face is made up of planes and contours, highlights and shadows, and these Adams rendered superbly and yet, the essential enigma any human visage displays eluded his lens. By contrast, he gazed on peaks and cliffsides and snaking rivers as though they were the features of a much-loved face. In his great “Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California” of 1944, the lichens that speckle the strewn boulders beneath the peaks, as well as the luminous wisps of cloud high in the sky, are dense with mysterious but familiar presences. The wildest and loneliest natural scenes that Adams looked upon seem to have looked back at him with unexpected recognition.

Perhaps this was because Adams drew on a process that he called “pre-visualization.” When he photographed, he tried to capture the elements of a landscape as he’d already pictured them in his mind. The click of the shutter merely fixed an image on film that he had already taken in his head. In his manuals of photography, Adams presents this pretty much as a technical matter; but it was clearly more than a compositional device. It was a way of internalizing the outside world; even more, of allowing the emotion those snowy mountaintops and wind-twisted trees inspired in him to infuse their captured images. This gives his finest photographs tremendous emotional power.

In his most famous work, such as “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” of 1941, fully two-thirds of the frame is occupied by an immensity of black sky where the rising moon floats. But nothing less than the whole sky could bring out the small, almost inconspicuous features of the town of Hernandez huddled beneath the night with its squat houses and the glinting crosses of its modest graveyard. Much of the power of this justly celebrated image comes from the fact that it is an abstract composition, consisting of a succession of horizontal bands from the shrubs of the foreground to the bright streaks of cloud below the moon, vividly punctuated by homely human structures. Three years later, in “Winter Sunrise,” the tiny, off-center figure of a grazing horse in Lone Pine, California, gives significance to the jagged peaks of the Sierra Nevada soaring high above it. By such small brushstrokes, rather than by straining for the sublime, Adams gave raw wilderness an expressive face.

In his “Roman Elegies,” Goethe wrote that the splendor of the Eternal City taught him “feeling with the eyes.” Adams was puzzled and a bit troubled when critics saw abstraction in his compositions. The abstraction was there, of course, but it was a tactile abstraction. It was the meticulous discipline of an attentive eye that organizes the world into coherent images. Through a lifetime of such images, we witness how Adams himself learned to “feel with his eyes.” He taught us all to see and we still see the land through his lens.

eormsby@nysun.com