TTP by Japanese photographer Hayahisa Tomiyasu was made from 2012 to 2016 from his eighth-floor student apartment in Leipzig, Germany, and follows the changing public uses of a ping-pong table in the athletics grounds below. The title abbreviates the German Tischtennisplatte, meaning table-tennis table. The project began after Tomiyasu saw a fox cross the field in 2011. While waiting unsuccessfully for it to return, he noticed how people gathered around the table without playing its intended game. This redirected attention allowed him to examine everyday behavior, social contact, isolation, and the unanticipated possibilities of an ordinary object in public space.
Across 110 color photographs, the table remains the visual anchor within a recurring view. Seen from above and at a distance, it is accompanied by a blue railing, surrounding tracks, soil, grass, and other details of the athletic grounds. People turn it into a sun bed, picnic station, climbing frame, exercise platform, meeting place, laundry surface, skate obstacle, and dog-grooming station. Children, couples, families, athletes, and birds enter and leave the frame, while changes in weather, vegetation, and ground color register the seasons. Although the viewpoint appears fixed, Tomiyasu shifted the camera slightly left or right in response to each scene.
Tomiyasu worked with a digital camera and tripod at his window, using color to convey seasonal changes in the landscape. A telephoto lens kept the table and the activity around it clearly legible from the elevated viewpoint. Over five years he accumulated perhaps 8,000 photographs, often reorganizing his daily routine to remain near the window. For the photobook, he rejected chronological order and linked pictures through gestures, formal echoes, background changes, and shifts in pace. The vertical format reflects the shape of the window, while the single-image pagination discourages immediate side-by-side comparison.
The project was shown at Galerie b2_ in Leipzig in 2016 and won the 2018 MACK First Book Award, leading to a 260-page publication designed with BNAG. Critics have variously described the table as a protagonist and the window view as a form of concealed observation. Later presentations extended the work's spatial concerns. At Images Vevey in 2020, photographs were installed on and around a public ping-pong table and viewed from a nearby residence, echoing the original relationship between private interior and shared outdoor space.
