Hayahisa Tomiyasu is a Japanese photographer from Kanagawa, who lives and works between Zurich and Chigasaki. In 2011, he spotted a fox from his bedroom window in Leipzig, as it walked past a ping-pong table in the park below. As he sat by the window waiting for it to return each day, he began to observe the ping-pong table itself, and realized it was being used for everything but ping-pong. Over the following five years, he photographed party-goers as they set up a marquee beside it and used it to hold their drinks, while others sheltered beneath it to hide from sudden rain showers, and runners used it to do their morning stretches. We featured the project on the site, and while Hayahisa told us he never gave the meaning of the series much thought, we felt it raised interesting questions about form and function, and about whether objects are defined by what they were intended to be used for, or what they really end up becoming.
Stories with Hayahisa Tomiyasu