O.C. ART : Adams’ View Is Not the Last Word : Photographer’s fans are sometimes blinded to work made for reasons other than technical virtuosity or love of nature.

What is it about Ansel Adams, anyway? Just mention his name and you get worshipful looks from people for whom Adams seems to embody everything that’s good and true about photography. Even if all those folks have practically memorized the man’s famous prints by now, they never seem to get enough.

So the good news is that Adams is getting another show. It opens Tuesday 8 at UC Irvine with fanfare galore because the 100 prints at the Fine Arts Gallery have never been exhibited before. They come from the Bancroft Library Centennial Collection at UC Berkeley, and they consist of photographs of UC campuses, research stations and agricultural units taken by Adams in the mid-1960s.

Also on view (at Monarch Bay Gallery in the Student Center) is the “Museum Set,” a limited edition--chosen by Adams--of 75 of his all-time greatest hits.

Why was the man who celebrated the pristine splendors of Yosemite spending his days photographing UC campuses? Well, UC President Clark Kerr was an admirer, and his wife, Kay, got to know Adams when they both served on the board of a conservationist organization. So in 1963, when Adams was 61, Kerr commissioned him and Nancy Newhall--a writer who had collaborated with Adams on several books--to do a “portrait” of the university system for the upcoming centennial.

During the next four years, Adams took more than 6,000 photographs, from which he made a final selection of 605 images. They were included in a book published for the centennial (“Fiat Lux: The University of California”), which otherwise came and went on little cat feet. The big news in 1968 in Berkeley, of course, was campus demonstrations and proposals for a radical restructuring of academic and political life. It was not a time to look backward.

Although the present exhibit catalogue contains glowing reports of Adams’ enthusiasm for the project, he never wrote a word about it in his chatty autobiography. It seems more likely that the $75,000 assignment was appealing to him primarily as bread-and-butter work for a distinguished patron. Few people or institutions collected photographs in the 1960s, and Adams’ name was not yet the household word it would be at his death in 1984.

Now, if these photographs had been made by John Doe, only alumni who get all teary-eyed every time they think of dear old UC would be dashing off to view 100 scenes of college campuses and other properties. But because the photographer was Adams, the fuss and furor has been propelled to epic proportions.

In fact, many of the photographs are pretty boring. It almost seems a waste of so much technical brilliance to see such unexceptional views in minute gradations of gray and black, with the attention to detail that allows the outline of each leaf, building and scientific gadget to leap out.

As Adams himself wrote in the introduction to “Fiat Lux,” “Most laboratories, no matter how world-shaking their achievements, contain much the same hardware or glassware.” The infant UC Irvine campus--bare as a baby’s bottom--really stumped him. Understandably, he was most in his element at the agricultural stations--out in nature, where his heart belonged.

Typically for Adams, humans take second place in these images. The kind of events alumni remember--such as emotional crowds at football games, students falling asleep in classrooms, fraternity beer bashes and dormitory gossip sessions--are nowhere to be found. Except for a stray professor or farmer, most of the figures in the photos are anonymous members of the student crowds walking through campus plazas or pin-dot spectators in a huge stadium shot.

Whether consciously or not, the “fiat lux” (Latin for “let there be light”) theme comes across in such images as “Fountain Into Sun,” in which leaping arcs of water sparkle in the light.

But for the most part, Adams concerns himself with such less-than-scintillating subjects as scientific gadgetry (a magnetic coil, a giant telescope), the details of forgettable architecture (his ultra-crisp technique is exactly right for the angular modernism of ‘60s), routine panoramic views and workaday glimpses of the university’s varied landholdings, which range from farmland to forests.

Some of the campus photographs do have the fabled Adams touch--but that’s usually because they remind us of famous shots from earlier days. “Moonrise,” shot at the UCLA campus, is an attractive print, but it begs to be compared with Adams’ famous moonrise image made at Yosemite. Even the whoosh and slide of “Waterflow: Irrigation Lab” at UC Davis looks somewhat like a miniature version of the famous Adams waterfall scenes, such as “Bridal Veil Fall, Yosemite” (both of which are included in the “Museum Set.”)

From a contemporary point of view, the most interesting shots tend to be the weirdest, the most peculiarly “retro” and the ones that seem to pose questions instead of supplying comforting answers.

One print, taken at the Jules Stein Eye Clinic at UCLA, shows fingers opening a scowling man’s eye, which appears to be illuminated by an eerie internal light. A view of open-heart surgery reveals a wondrous medical landscape, with the opened skin as a crater and the network of needles like so many grasses.

The sight of an engineering student with a gigantic computer (in 1967, at UC Santa Barbara) looks amusingly dated today. And the image of a woman whose head is hooked up to a battery of machines at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at UC San Francisco is likely to make viewers think of old-fashioned textbook photos and silly B movies.

“Trailers and Construction Debris”--a rare sign of mess in Adams’ well-groomed world--might be a commentary on the carelessness of the human animal, spoiling nature with ticky-tacky construction.

A few images have local interest: Longtime UC Irvine art department member Tony DeLap is seen as an earnest young man in his studio in 1967; architect William Pereira stands proudly alongside his campus plan, and two pedestrians are dwarfed by the sci-fi monstrosity of one of the ghastly buildings he favored.

Adams began snapping pictures in 1914 as an adolescent eager to record the world around him. By 1931 he cast aside aspirations of becoming a concert pianist to devote himself to photography. The following year he got together with such colleagues as Edward Weston, Imogene Cunningham and Willard van Dyke to form Group f/64, dedicated to the pure, unmanipulated print at a time when photographers preferred fuzzy, romantic images. (The group’s name came from the small lens opening that produces a sharply defined picture.)

Fellow photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo once called Adams “a great academic who produces emotion through his mastery of the technicalities.” Indeed, in 1940 he earned the undying respect of his peers by inventing the Zone System, which enables photographers to previsualize their work by relating exposure times to different values of gray in the final print.

For many viewers, technical mastery is one of the most impressive aspects of art. The other, perhaps even more powerful lure of Adams’ photography is his deep love of the natural world. A founding member of the Sierra Club, he once said that his approach to photography was based on his “belief in the vigor and values of the world of nature--in the aspects of grandeur and of the minutiae all about us.”

This credo is abundantly illustrated in the “Museum Set” photographs, which include such marvels of the medium as “Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada”--the one with successive layers of contrasting landscape: chalky mountains, velvety black lowland, sun-kissed dry tree branches and a glimpse of a lone black horse.

Alongside such images as “Mt. McKinley and Wonder Lake”--talcum-like mountains rising in cold splendor and a glassy body of water in which tiny ripples look as minutely scrutinized as skin under a microscope--there are such delicate scenes as “Dawn, Autumn,” a pointillist vision of stems and leaves in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, Tenn.

The set also includes photographs not as readily associated with Adams, such as a seemingly candid shot of artist Georgia O’Keeffe displaying a coyly humorous expression under her broad-brimmed black hat, and a 1944 portrait of a Mrs. Gunn, whose glassed-in porch betrays the bare-bones neatness of someone who has grown too sad or old to pursue a life.

Much as viewers may admire Adams’ grand and glorious view of nature, however, his is only one way of regarding the natural world. Since Adams’ time, other photographers have gone on to record more frankly the human impact on the land. One generation’s notion of ideal perfection gives way to another’s interest in flaws, quirks and absurdities.

The problem with Adams is not that he wasn’t a spectacularly good photographer. The problem is that his virtues seem to have so dazzled his admirers that they are blind to work made for other reasons than technical virtuosity and ardent love of nature. Adams fans are likely to go crazy over the most trite “picture postcard” image made by imitators, but they aren’t willing to give other forms of art photography a chance. Surely that isn’t too much to ask.

“Ansel Adams: Eloquent Images” are at UC Irvine through Feb. 10, in two campus locations: the Fine Arts Gallery (“Fiat Lux”) and the Monarch Bay Gallery in the Student Center (“The Museum Set”). The exhibit is sponsored by Pacific Telesis Foundation. Gallery hours at both locations are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 856-6610.

UCI is also offering an evening lecture series on Adams at Crystal Cove Auditorium in the UCI Student Center on Jan. 9, 16 and 23 , and an afternoon film screening on Jan. 13. For information on th e se programs: (714) 856-6379. For tickets: (714) 856-5000.

A free day of Adams-related presentations on Jan. 26 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Fine Arts Concert Hall will include critical dialogue about Adams’ relation to the landscape tradition and about the upheaval within the UC system during the 1960s. Mark Kitchell’s film, “Berkeley in the ‘60s,” will be screened. Guest speakers include photo historian David L. Jacobs of the University of Houston, and photographer and historian Deborah Bright of the Rhode Island School of Design. Information: (714) 856-4917.