Not sure if there is anything like a coffee-table font.
I think it really depends what feel you want to
communicate, what the photos are about (sad, funny,
etc), who is going to read the book (old, young,
male, female, etc)?

I think in the end you have to treat the book like
every other design project and by answering
the basic questions it will get you closer to your
font choice.

I wonder whether your approach has to do with captions. There was a school of thought that held that if the text is serif, the captions can be sans-serif. So it, sort-of, follows that if you only have captions, you should be in sans-serif. However, in most books the main face is serif (for various reasons). Check some cook books.

I would say that you are free to do as you wish. Whatever you fancy?

intuitively, Franklin Gothic sounds like a good fit.

Thanks for the various perspectives! All the posts have been quite helpful. Franklin Gothic is right up the sans serif alley for what I was visualizing - thanks!

"I wonder whether your approach has to do with captions."
This is an interesting thought. I'll admit that for the two coffee-table-ish books I've worked on so far, I leaned towards sans serifs as well (once Fedra Sans Alt, once Legato), and your explanation for this sounds pretty good. FWIW, I mostly feel that whoever looks at a coffee-table book doesn't usually want to read for hours, and sans serifs seem to be good at communicating that "don't worry, this text isn't long", plus "this book is not primarily about reading". I often feel that usual seriffed/"book" text faces would give the text in a coffee-table book too much of a "bookish" flavor. If that makes any sense.

Indeed Altaira - agree 100%. What I was thinking was that the serif might somewhat "trap/fishhook" the reader rather than the sans-serif "freeing" the reader to leave the text and look at the photographs. This was somewhat the basis for my question in the first place - wondering if perhaps a sans-serif font would actually be preferable for this kind of project due to its cleaner look/feel. I am tossing various ideas back and forth and doing a lot of undo & redo in InDesign.

Thanks for the input. Legato appears to be a good lead that I will have to investigate.