15-seconds

15 seconds or little more: that's the time Israeli citizens have to find out the nearest shelter in case of enemy bombing attack announced by the sound of sirens, particularly in cities near the Palestinian territories in the south of the country. Each building is designed considering the presence of a bomb shelter in it: in the oldest they take place in an underground room available to all tenants of the building, while in the most new constructions is a concrete reinforced cell, placed on each floor and in each apartment set up and used as a standard bedroom or study. From outside it's easy to recognize the heavy steel windows which draw a clear vertical line on the façades of the buildings. In public open spaces, especially near gardens and gathering places is easy to distinguish structures in reinforced concrete with doors and windows and features air vents. Even in most of the Kibutzs outside the cities there are some bunkers: some of them, the newer, are built with prefabricated materials and placed in the green areas between house and house. If in cities such as Tel Aviv these objects appear like "forgotten", in other situations with higher bomb risk, as in Sderot in the south of the country, the bunkers are ready to be used and even continue to be built and added to homes that are still lacking. On a trip from the north to the south of Israel, until the border with the Gaza Strip, I researched for the silent artifacts between buildings, public spaces and in the private houses: this series of images shows the constant presence of shelters in the normal everyday life. The photographs were taken in some of the major Israeli city with a medium format film camera.