Many of William Eggleston’s great photographs make a point of seeming to show nothing at all. Consider The Democratic Forest, a new book published in conjunction with an exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, including selections from 1983 to 1988 that convey quiet and sparse scenes of America (and not to be confused with his 1989 album of the same title). In his remarkable picture of a laundry room, for example, the white appliances sit squarely at angles to themselves, defining the neat and inglorious space in a harmony of edges. A vacuum cleaner and chair pose side by side, and a yellow laundry basket sits atop one of the machines, just to one side of a water heater in the corner, all of them like the attributes of a saint who forgot to appear in her own altarpiece.

And in this space where nothing is happening, where the photographer’s charge to himself seems to be, “Make a picture of nothing at all,” the emptiness takes on a special character. Note for example how different the laundry room is from Edward Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea, of 1951, the midcentury benchmark for the portentous depiction of empty rooms. In that picture, no matter how else we may gloss it, the existential grandeur of an elemental fate is impossible to miss.

Eggleston’s laundry room, by contrast, avoids the feeling of existential crisis. Instead the beauty of the scene derives from the simple geometries of a feminine space, a domestic one, not unlike some of the other subjects in this book (Eudora Welty’s simple curtained kitchen window, for example). And those beauties, allowed to remain unsung, begin to echo with their own emptiness.