A Photojournalist at War. 36 Frames

From 31 July to 30 September 2026 the Open-Air Gallery of the Royal Łazienki Museum on Aleje Ujazdowskie showed, on 30 panels, photographs taken by the Press War Correspondents of the Warsaw Uprising, in a display prepared by the Warsaw Rising Museum.

The Royal Łazienki Museum on the exhibition:

We invite you to an open-air exhibition presenting photographs from the Warsaw Uprising. Their authors are the photojournalists who, as the “W-hour” struck, went out into the streets to document the course of the uprising.

The exhibition in the Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie is devoted to the PSW - the Press War Correspondents. It complements an album published for the 82nd anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, containing their photographs. The images presented build a multi-dimensional picture of a fighting Warsaw.

Like the album, the exhibition leads viewers along the trail of anonymous war correspondents crossing the city as it was being destroyed. They did not avoid difficult subjects, which is why the reportage captured on film is both a reliable document and a personal testimony full of emotion. The photographs are supplemented by first-person, strongly emotional captions, and accompanied by quotations from insurgent newspapers, underlining the press context of the material presented.

The exhibition was prepared by the Warsaw Rising Museum.

What to expect

The Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie is the park railing along the avenue, the avenue running south from the city centre - the exhibition was open around the clock and free, including outside museum opening hours. The display was bilingual, in Polish and English. According to the Warsaw Rising Museum, the 30 panels set the photographs beside articles from the insurgent press, posters, prints and drawings of the period. The title refers to the 36 frames on a roll of film: that was all a photographer had, so every shot was a deliberate choice.

The exhibition description remains on the Royal Łazienki Museum’s website (in Polish).

Updates

• 2026-10-01 - the exhibition closed on 30 September 2026, with no extension (source: Royal Łazienki open-air exhibitions).

After the show

The photographs came from a Warsaw Rising Museum album, which the museum’s shop and announcements title “Fotograf na wojnie. 36 klatek” (A Photographer at War. 36 Frames). It holds nearly 200 photographs by 23 photojournalists of the Home Army’s Bureau of Information and Propaganda: first 36 frames arranged into a story by war photographer Wojtek Grzędziński, with diary-like notes by reporter Paweł Reszka, then a catalogue of the best images in the museum’s collection. Published on 27 July 2026 (256 pages, paperback, 210 x 270 mm, ISBN 978-83-64308-81-9, in Polish), it costs 79 PLN in the Warsaw Rising Museum shop. If you missed the exhibition, the book holds the full 36-frame story the panels drew their selection from.

TVN Warszawa (30 July 2026, Piotr Bakalarski) described the album as a reporter’s walk through fighting Warsaw in 36 pictures, from the joy of the first days of the Uprising to the death and destruction of the last - tvn24.pl (in Polish). According to the report, the Warsaw Rising Museum’s deputy director Dariusz Gawin said at the album launch that its collective authorship stands for the Uprising as a shared effort of the people of Warsaw and of Poles.

A current Royal Łazienki exhibition in the same spot:

• Stills from the Film Lalka (The Doll) - in the Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie until 31 October 2026; the same railing, free entry, this time with frames from the new screen adaptation of Bolesław Prus’s novel.

Other current shows in Warsaw on the Uprising and on photography:

• Bogusław Lustyk: The Memory of the Uprising - at the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, in the Brama Bielańska Gallery of the Warsaw Citadel, until 25 October 2026; paintings and installations on the memory of 1944 by an artist born in Warsaw four years before the Uprising.
• Transformations. Old and New Photography from the Collections of the Asia and Pacific Museum - at the Asia and Pacific Museum until 24 January 2027; 80 photographs in 40 pairs, an old frame beside a new one, for anyone the Łazienki panels left curious about photography as a document.

Museum profile: Royal Łazienki Museum.