From its creation in 1948, Israel has felt isolated and under threat from its enemies. This collective siege mentality manifests itself with over one million public and private bomb shelters, found throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories. Architecture of an Existential Threat by Adam Reynolds is published by Edition Lammerhuber. All photographs: Adam Reynolds/Edition Lammerhuber

From 2013 to 2015, Reynolds travelled the country to photograph these so-called ‘doomsday spaces’

In recent years, attempts have been made to give bomb shelters an appearance that better reflects modern Israeli identity

Reynolds’ photographs reveal how Israelis have creatively integrated these rooms into their everyday lives

Israeli law stipulates that every citizen must have access to a shelter that can be sealed in case of an attack with unconventional weapons

Shelters have been transformed so that they can function as dance studios, school classrooms, community centres, bars, gyms and places of worship

Reynolds’ photographs seek to straddle the worlds of fine art and reportage

The shelter project was born out of a trip to Jerusalem in 2000 and 2001 during the second intifada when Reynolds witnessed what was left of several buses blown up by suicide bombers. He writes: ‘These charred remains, devoid of people, allowed me to enter that physical space and to insert myself mentally into its tragic reality. The idea of offering the viewer the empty space for personal reflection and contemplation became the initial goal for creating the bomb shelter images’

This photograph shows a recreation room in student dormitories at the University of Haifa

Reynolds cites Richard Ross’s Waiting for the End of the World, which looked at the interiors of cold-war era shelters, and Lucinda Devlin’s The Omega Suites, which examines execution chambers in the United States, as among the inspirations for his work

Reynolds says: ‘I worked to divorce myself from my own views regarding the Israeli-Arab conflict. My goal is for the architectural spaces, absent of people, to communicate directly with the viewers and allow them to come to their own conclusions’

Reynolds’ photos reveal the efforts of people in Israel to make these spaces, which guarantee survival in extreme situations, seem as ‘normal’ as possible. It is a fragile normalcy