La Table

Suzanne Okafor photographed shared tables across three continents. Each table she captures three times: set and empty, at the height of the meal, then cleared. From this sequence a story emerges with almost no characters — hospitality becomes a form one can read. Okafor attends to the details that carry it: the arrangement of places, the disorder that settles in, the leavings that say a welcome was given. She does not seek the exoticism of cuisines; she shows what repeats everywhere: a table is laid to bring people closer. The continents change, the gestures hold. The book moves like a meal, from waiting to fullness, and leaves the reader the empty place, the one kept for them. A patient study of the moment when people sit down together and, for the length of a meal, make something common.