Images of a bathroom, a sewing nook, a shoe polishing kit and kitchen towel rack, along with living rooms both modest and lavish, desks and wood-paneled libraries, are only a few of Ben Lam’s fascinating photographs. He mostly engages with marking out distinct foundational moments in Israeli visual culture through an examination of the personal, private and public spaces of leading figures from Israeli history, spaces whose character was shaped by their wives.

In the series of photographs on view, Lam has chosen to enter the private residences of three historical figures: the house of national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and his wife Manya (built in 1925); the home of first President Chaim Weizmann and his wife Vera, built on the grounds of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot (1935–1936); the apartment of Israel’s first Prime Minister and Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion and his wife Pola, on Sderot Ben-Gurion, Tel Aviv (1930–1931) and the hut in Sde Boker to which they moved in 1953.

These three couples had a direct and indirect impact on local aesthetics, its ethical and ethnic character, and domestic culture in pre-state Israel, leaving a lasting mark on approximately two decades post-independence. Ben Lam seeks to contribute his part to documenting the findings referring to personal narratives: the inkwell and desk used by Chaim Nachman Bialik to write the Book of Legends (Sefer HaAggadah); the room where Ben-Gurion ate Pola’s famous “kutch-mutch”; the English tone that Vera Weizmann imported into the Middle East, which was becoming more westernized through Erich Mendelsohn’s Modernism.