`ANSEL ADAMS' LIFE STORY EMERGES SLIGHTLY ASKEW.

Byline: Sarah Boxer The New York Times

Title: ``Ansel Adams: A Biography''

Author: Mary Street Alinder

Data: Illustrated. 489 pages, Henry Holt; $30.

Our rating: Three Stars

In the death scene of ``Ansel Adams: A Biography,'' the author crawls into bed with her newly deceased subject: ``He was still warm ... I placed my cheek next to his once more and whispered that it was time for him to go ... I had a strange feeling, and turning around, I saw Ansel up in the corner of the room looking down at us.'' Perhaps, she says, ``we saw AA as he left his body.''

This intimate but unaffecting biography is the second time that Mary Street Alinder, Adams' occasional nurse and the head of his staff from 1979 to 1984, has approached the life of Ansel Adams. The first came 12 years ago, when she helped him write ``Ansel Adams: An Autobiography'' just before he died in 1984.

This biography, like the autobiography, begins with the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which threw the 4-year-old Ansel into a wall and gave him his crooked nose. It takes us through his childhood, with his frustrated, nature-loving father and his distant, formal mother (who is barely mentioned), then moves through his first chosen career, as a pianist, and follows the early budding of his brash and ambitious character.

But the recognizable Adams, the tireless photographer and preservationist, does not appear until 1916, when he meets the love of his life, Yosemite.

Yosemite National Park was the site of Adams' first adventures with a camera, the reason he met his wife, Virginia Best (her father had a photographic studio and a piano in Yosemite), the excuse he had for missing the births of both of his children (he was taking pictures), the focus of his activities in the Sierra Club and the place where he clowned around with his buddies (he was known around Yosemite for waking his friends with a donkey bray and for his spoofs of Greek tragedies, like ``The Trudgin' Women'').

Although Alinder makes a big deal of Adams' extramarital affairs, it seems that his main infidelity was not with women but with Yosemite and with his camera, and usually with both of them at once.

Yosemite was, for instance, the place where Adams took ``Monolith,'' the picture Alinder calls the ``biggest artistic breakthrough of his life.'' It was in this photo, taken on April 10, 1927, that Adams came to the concept of visualization, ``the notion that the photographer should know how the finished print will look before the negative is even exposed.''

Alinder ably chronicles Adams' aesthetic breakthroughs and career moves: his first commercial assignment, photographing the kindergarten of the Baptist Chinese Grammar School (1920); his acquisition of his first patron, Albert Bender (1926); his initiation into f/64, the straight photography movement, which called for clear, detailed photographs that do not try to imitate other arts (the 1930s); the beginning of his lifelong friendship with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, who were his main connections to New York and the Museum of Modern Art (1939); his frenzied and serendipitous capture of ``Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,'' the photo that made him a star (1941); his aestheticized chronicling of the Manzanar Relocation Center, an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in Owens Valley in California (1943) and his late career teaching, consulting and printing (beginning in the 1950s and continuing until his death).

In this book, Alinder has scattered some odd details about Adams. Though he was a practitioner of straight photography, he used ink to blot out some unsightly letters that were painted on the rocks depicted in ``Winter Sunrise,'' one of the pictures he took near Manzanar. He sometimes thought he was telepathic. He loved to fill out questionnaires, whether they were from Publishers Clearinghouse or the Church of Scientology. He liked to end a playful performance at the piano by sitting on it.

And to mortify young photographers who came to show their portfolios, he would have one of his assistants remark how much better the young photographer's work was compared with Adams' and then tear up a print of Adams' ``Moonrise'' in front of the visitor to prove it. ``This trick never failed to elicit a huge belly laugh from Ansel.''

Still, for all the high jinks, Adams' life is not, for the most part, fun to read, for a few reasons. He spread himself thin, dashing from one assignment to another, and he was a true technophile. (He was the founder of the famous Zone system, the method for teasing out as many shades of gray as possible in a photograph.)

What's more, Adams was always chasing money, whether he was rolling in it or dirt poor. Alfred Stieglitz, Adams' artistic mentor in the 1930s, Alinder writes, criticized Adams because he ``not only accepted commercial assignments, he beat the bushes for them.'' Dorothea Lange, who worked with Ansel Adams on a number of projects, once said that when it came to money, he was ``just like a homing pigeon.''

Adams' life, as a result, seems diffuse and chaotic. And Alinder's narrative style doesn't help.

The book is organized roughly thematically and roughly chronologically. But when the chronology doesn't fit, it is thrown out the window. The big Yosemite fire that destroyed many of Adams' photographs occurs twice. Nancy and Beaumont Newhall die in one chapter only to be walking around decades earlier in the next one.

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Photo: (1--2) To Ansel Adams, above left, Yosemite Natio nal Park was the love of his life. It was the site of Adams' first adventures with a camera, the reason he met his wife, the excuse he had for missing the births of both of his children and the place where he clowned around with his buddies.