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Photographer Spent Five Years Capturing the Surprising Ways His Community Used a Ping-Pong Table

By Emma Taggart on November 3, 2025

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Public spaces rarely behave the way their designers imagined. In cities, people carve new paths, claim unlikely meeting spots, and reshape the built environment to match their routines. In his TTP (Tischtennisplatte) series, photographer Hayahisa Tomiyasu captures this beautifully, documenting a Leipzig community that turned a public ping-pong table into a multi-purpose object.

Tomiyasu created the series when he was studying photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. He was initially trying to capture a local fox he spotted once, but the series slowly evolved into something unexpected. Tomiyasu recalled the moment he saw the fox, saying, “He stopped right before passing the ping pong table and lifted its head to look at it. Then he went on and left the field.” The patient photographer waited for the animal to return, but it never did, so he started observing the ping-pong table where the fox once visited.

Tomiyasu spent the next five years watching and photographing the ping-pong table from the window of his old student apartment, capturing the daily life of his neighbors. Through changing seasons, he saw it become a playground, a picnic spot, a gym bench, a sunbed, and just about anything imaginable, except a place to play ping-pong. His TTP series brilliantly reveals the unexpected versatility of a ping-pong table and the dynamic social behaviors of the community that surrounds it.

TTP has been exhibited in London and Tokyo, and it’s currently on view as part of the Dynamic Spaces exhibition at GfZK Leipzig. If you can’t make it to Germany, the photo series has also been published as a book, allowing you to flip through the collection at home.