WILSHIRE CENTER

Early in his photographic work, shortly after giving up a promising career as a concert pianist, the young Ansel Adams criticized work that “makes more of its subjects than they are in the strict photographic sense.” This artistic prejudice was obvious in the photographer’s heroic, sweeping but always realistic natural vistas. An intimate show of work mainly from the ‘30s and ‘40s distills a good sample of his vision. There are sultry moons rising over sleepy border towns, breathtaking expanses of Yosemite National Park and even a study of solitary, striated sand dunes, demonstrating that Adams may have preferred the conservationist’s actuality but his range and expertise encompassed poetic abstractions as well. (G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 7224 Melrose Ave., to Sept. 12.)