How many of these people think about the day they spent with this one ping pong table in Leipzig, Germany?
There’s a good chance the people in each of these photos, capturing largely mundane moments in so many lives, have forgotten all about that day.
But, thanks to photographer Hayahisa Tomiyasu, who only wanted to snap a shot of the curious fox he spied one Sunday afternoon in 2011, we now have a collection of photos that are so much more than each moment within.
After all… each of the photos, on its own, is just a moment caught from afar. Some of them hint at a memorable event, but most are just people relaxing and hanging out.
These photos, and many more that Hayahisa Tomiyasu has collected in a book, were captured between 2012 and 2016. All he wanted was a photo of that fox he first saw months earlier!
“He stopped right before passing the ping pong table and lifted his head to look at it. Then he went on and left the field,” Hayahisa writes in his book.
For the next four years, Hayahisa waited for the fox to return. It never did (spoiler), but soon enough, he realised that the table itself was regularly the centre of scenes he felt worth capturing. Over time, he found himself cancelling plans just to stay near the window, ready to document whatever might happen.
His work captured the interest of Mack Books and, in 2018, the book TTP was published. What does TTP stand for? You’re probably thinking “Table tennis… p… what”, and you’re not far off. Instead, it’s the German term for a table tennis table: Tischtennisplatte.
Tisch on its own means table, as the general word for a piece of furniture with a flat top supported by legs. Platte on its own has several meanings, but in this context, it refers to a flat slab or board. (It can of course also mean “plate” in the sense of a flat piece of material.)
Amusingly, the table itself never hosts an actual ping pong game in these shots.
As the description for Hayahisa’s book reads:
“From his south-facing view we see a ’tischtennisplatte’ or ping pong table used for a plethora of purposes – including a sun bed, a laundry counter, a kids’ climbing frame, an exercise site, a family lunch spot, a refuge from busy streets, among various other uses – except table tennis.”
You won’t find any lengthy imaginings on the lives of the people shown in the book – it’s literally just the photos – but it looks like a lovely coffee table book. Unless you have a ping pong table that it could live on?
You can check out the book here on Amazon. (Affiliate link.)
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