Democratic Forest

Fascinated by the commonplace, the author ( William Eggleston's Guide ) portrays in these 150 color photographs obdurately ordinary objects with a candor and respect for place brought into focus by a subtle sense of decline. Storefronts in East Tennessee, Mississippi parking lots and vehicles traveling through the great leveled spaces of Atlanta highways let us dwell in the familiar and mundane. These down-to-earth pictures tell their elegies in a muted voice, catching the eye with details: light and shade revive deteriorating brick and shape a roadside fruit stall and van into muscular bulk. Taken during the last decade, the photographs were shot ``outdoors, nowhere, in nothing.'' (Nov.)