Here's an exhibit by America's best-loved artist.

OK, OK - Ansel Adams might have to arm wrestle Norman Rockwell for that title. And they're both dead.

But let's not quibble. The photographer's images of Yosemite National Park and the West have become national icons. Adams' pictures fueled the modern environmental movement; but more than that, they captured the imagination of all America in a way that few visual artists have done before or since.

Late in life, Adams printed whole sets of his most famous photographs to be sold to museums. One of those, now owned by the Mint Museums in Charlotte, N.C., is the source of "Ansel Adams: The Man Who Captured the Earth's Beauty," at the Art Museum of Western Virginia through Sept. 11.

The 25 images span Adams' long career - from his "Monolith, The Face of Half Dome" of 1927 to late works such as "Eagle Peak and Middle Brother" (1968). The museum has fleshed out the modestly sized show with a gallery of photographs from its collection including works by Alfred Stieglitz, Thomas Eakins, Audrey Flack, Glen McClure and Sally Mann.

Who hasn't heard of Ansel Adams? In his 1986 introduction to "Ansel Adams: Classic Images," John Szarkowski calls America's love for Adams "an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even one unparalleled in our country's response to a visual artist."

He was on the cover of Time magazine in 1979; President Carter gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. There have been other fine photographers of mountains and the American West.

None entered the popular consciousness like Adams, who died in 1984.

Szarkowski, now director emeritus of the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, has called the pictures a "metaphor for freedom and heroic aspirations. Adams' photographs seem to demonstrate that the world is what we would wish it was - a place with room in it for fresh beginnings."

He was born in San Francisco in 1902. Adams' father, Charles Hitchcock Adams, owned a lumber company that failed; he spent much of the rest of his life paying off his debts. Nevertheless, Ansel grew up in a spacious house within sight of the Pacific Ocean. As a boy, he endured the infamous San Francisco earthquake of 1906, although his nose was broken; a doctor recommended waiting until he had matured to fix it. "Apparently I never matured, as I have yet to see a surgeon about it," Adams wrote in his autobiography in old age.

Intelligent and inquisitive as a child, he was also hyperactive and a poor student. He bounced from school to school until his father finally had him tutored at home. He eventually received the official equivalent of an eighth-grade education.

But Adams, encouraged by his father, learned in other ways. After teaching himself to play the family's upright piano, he decided on a career as a pianist and began taking lessons seriously. His photography would one day take precedence, but Adams later said the piano taught him discipline.

As part of his unorthodox education, Adams was sent almost daily for a year to the Panama- Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Among the marvels were prints by photographer Edward Weston and paintings by Monet, Van Gogh, Munch and Cezanne.

Another world would soon begin to tug at Adams' heart - the natural one.

In 1916, while Adams was in bed with a cold, an aunt gave him a copy of "In the Heart of the Sierras" by J.M. Hutchings. The teen was transported. On recovering, he persuaded his family to go to Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for summer vacation. Shortly after their arrival, his parents gave him his first camera - a Kodak Box Brownie. "A new era began for me," wrote Adams, who kept returning to Yosemite his whole life.

He liked storms, winter, drama, dawn. He liked to contrast crystal clarity with mist, rocks with frothy water. He wasn't bound by what he saw; the images he sometimes altered with his lenses and in the darkroom could end up looking like something altogether outside nature, an abstraction.

Unlike O. Winston Link, who would haul hundreds of pounds of lamps and cables over field and stream to focus light on his beloved steam trains, Adams lighted his photographs with sun and sky. It wasn't always easy.

"He'd wait hours, sometimes it would be years, for the right atmospheric effect," said Susannah Koerber, the Art Museum of Western Virginia's chief curator.

The results could be astonishing, as in the Yosemite photographs of the twin peaks Eagle Peak and Middle Brother. The two nearly identical mountain peaks are alternately bathed in light and fog. In 1940's "Clearing Winter Storm," the upper portion of the photograph is a cauldron of snow, mist and light. Sometimes light and shadow lay in layers; the 1944 "Winter Sunrise; Sierra Nevada" shows a line of bright peaks in the background, a dark ridge in the middle distance and a shaft of light in the foreground that illuminates a feeding horse or deer (it's too far away to tell).

For Adams, "Art was about spiritual uplift," Koerber said - and he was not above juicing an image to get at an emotional truth. For "Monolith, The Face of Half Dome," Adams used a red filter to darken the image after an earlier effort failed to satisfy. The resulting sky looks like deep evening or predawn; in fact it was 2:30 in the afternoon. As Adams once explained it: "Photography is a way of telling what you feel about what you see." (The words are written on one of the exhibit walls.)

Adams was a technical innovator who developed an 11-zone printing process to bring out a range of subtleties between light and dark. In that process, Koerber hears an echo of Adams the pianist.

"He really looked at all the tones as chords," she said.

Adams spent his last years writing his autobiography and making museum prints. The Mint's set of prints was donated by Peter Scotese, a one-time textile industry executive. Scotese "was very interested in making this collection available to the public," said Martha Mayberry, registrar and associate curator at the Mint. "And he wanted it to travel." She said the prints have been traveling for years.

In his long life, Adams also took photographs in Wyoming, Alaska, New Mexico and elsewhere, but he always loved Yosemite - nearly half of the show's photographs were taken there. He conducted workshops for promising photography students at Yosemite into his old age.

One who went to learn at Adams' feet in the early 1970s was Lexington's Sally Mann.

Mann, who Time magazine labeled America's best photographer in 2001, was just out of Hollins College at the time. She recalled Adams as "a charming old man, a little rakish," with a sparkle in his eye. She dutifully tried to learn the 11-zone system, Mann said, but she never really got it. She returned the following summer as an assistant.

Did she learn a lot?

Well, not exactly. "It was a lot of people sitting around drinking beer," Mann confessed. "But we did talk about photography."

"Ansel Adams: The Man who Captured the Earth's Beauty" is on view at the Art Museum of Western Virginia through Sept. 11. 342-5760; www.artmuseumroanoke.org