The YBZ photo archive which holds images of the history of Jerusalem, the Land of Israel, and Jewish communities in the East, is the remnant of a larger photo archive which was held at YYBZ and was deposited in the Israel State Archives in 1999. The core of the YBZ Archives are Izhak and Rachel Ben-Zvis photo collections, from their childhoods in Poltava and Malin until Izhak Ben-Zvi’s term as President and beyond – thousands of private and public photos. The collections from Ben-Zvi’s years as president are in the common domain.
Other collections in the Archives include photos of relatives, friends, scholars, tour guides, and the collections of famous photographers, such as the Uri Dvir Collection and the Werner Braun Collection. The Archives include over 100,000 scanned and catalogued images in hundreds of collections, and covers150 years of photography in Israel and the world. There are images of various kinds: negatives, slides, printed photographs, postcards, aerial photographs and more, as well as different kinds of sources: maps, caricatures, banners, posters etc.
A large part of the Archives is dedicated to family albums which have been documented thanks to the generous and active assistance of families all over the country – the families retain the originals and a high-resolution digital copy is deposited in the Archives.
The Archives are the core of the scholarly and professional activities of the Israel Revealed to the Eye project.
The Archives are located on the ground floor of the historic House of Women Pioneers and are part of the Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Library.