For five years, Hayahisa Tomiyasu kept a camera trained out of the south-facing window of his student apartment in Leipzig. What held his attention was not the view but a tischtennisplatte — a ping-pong table — and the uses his neighbours found for it without ever playing ping-pong.

The resulting book, TTP, was published by MACK in 2021: 260 pages, perfect-bound paperback in a clear PVC jacket, 20 by 27 centimetres. Across the sequence the table becomes a sun bed, a laundry counter, a climbing frame for children, an exercise station, a spot for a family lunch, a shelter from a busy street. Tomiyasu is its only photographer, and the discipline of the project lies in his refusal to move.

Fixed vantage points are common in photography; attention sustained at this pitch is not. Tomiyasu photographed the same rectangle of ground through changing seasons, letting people arrive and leave, letting the scene mutate. What emerges is neither street photography nor strict typology but something closer to a long observational study, in which curiosity about ordinary behaviour accumulates into a portrait of a neighbourhood. The project received the 2018 MACK First Book Award before it appeared in print.

For a collector, TTP is worth attention as an example of method: a constraint adopted early, held for years, and resolved in book form. Its humour and its melancholy arrive through sequence — one frame answering another across dozens of pages — so the printed volume is not a container for pictures that would work equally well apart, but the structure that makes the work legible. It sits usefully beside other durational projects that fix on a single patch of ground and the people who pass over it.