tomiyasu hayahisa ping pong table ttp — © Tomiyasu Hayahisa

There’s a ping pong table in Leipzig. It’s not particularly special. Concrete slab, green top, white lines. The kind you’d find in countless German parks, existing in quiet, municipal anonymity. And yet, for four years, it became the gravitational center of photographer Tomiyasu Hayahisa’s world. Not because of table tennis—very little of that actually happened—but because of everything else.

A fox, a lone wanderer, sleek and spectral, made its way onto the field one day and stopped at the table. A glance, a moment’s curiosity, and then it was gone. Hayahisa, watching from his window, waited for it to return. It never did. But in the act of waiting, he found something else.

People. People treating the ping pong table as if it were anything but. Students draping themselves across it, sunbathers stretching out like lizards, children scrambling underneath like it was a concrete cave. One man perched solemnly at the edge, lost in a daydream. Others used it as a makeshift bar, setting up drinks while revelers danced around it. It was, in turns, a gym bench, a bus stop, a hiding place from the rain.

Hayahisa became obsessed. His camera took up permanent residence at his window. He skipped social events, let messages go unanswered, sacrificed Christmas and New Year’s Eve to the table’s silent, hypnotic pull. Every morning, the ritual: wake up, check the window. Who would be there today? What new way would the table be repurposed?

For four years, he documented this accidental stage of human behavior, where routine, boredom, and play all intertwined. There was no narrative, no attempt to contextualize. Just life, unfolding in fleeting, everyday absurdity.

In 2018, his work culminated in TTP, a photobook published by Mack that won the Mack First Book Award. A collection of static frames capturing the fluidity of human habits. A social study through the lens of quiet voyeurism. A meditation on function and reimagination.

The project is over. The window, long abandoned. But the question lingers: is the table still there? Are people still gathering, stretching, sitting, drinking? Has someone, after all this time, finally played an actual game of ping pong? We may never know. But one thing is certain: for four years, that unassuming slab of concrete held an entire world within its lines.