Most come from the Lane Collection, a munificent gift of more than 450 Adams photographs to the M.F.A. There are surprises too, like the breadth of Adams’s interests (and the extent of his need to earn a living with commissions and magazine work), from Native Americans to ghost towns, from a World War II Japanese internment camp to cemeteries, churches, a cigar store Indian, a highway interchange.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Adams experienced a heightened spirituality in the wilderness that spoke to a longing for the beauties, peace and spectacle of untrammeled nature — a yearning that lingers strongly in our time, suggesting it might be innate.

He was 14 when he first visited Yosemite. He quickly took his Kodak into that stupendous valley and was so moved by the experience that it changed his life. Adams meant his images to convey the emotions he experienced while taking pictures and then heightening their impact in the darkroom. (He was a superb printer.) How lucky it is for the arts that human vision, though it does not register the world in black and white, can respond to colorless representation on a level within reach of its response to color.

Landscape tourism grew exponentially from the post Civil War years to today, but untouched wilderness has dwindled as the population increased and migrated to cities and suburbs, while mining, drilling and industrialization encroached on open spaces. Adams, though well aware of how commercialized the national parks had become, could scarcely have anticipated that on summer weekends the grounds bordering the Grand Canyon would look like Woodstock.

He preferred the parks pristine, and Eadweard J. Muybridge’s 19th-century photograph of Yosemite Valley with a logging road cutting across it is paired at the M.F.A. with Adams’s image of the same place, the road carefully retouched out.