Rafał Milach. Fermata

Photographs of the crowds and backstage moments at three Polish summer music festivals, by Rafał Milach, one of Poland’s best-known documentary photographers. The show is on view in the Łazienki Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie, admission is free, and time is short: it closes on 30 September 2026.

The Royal Łazienki Museum on the exhibition:

Dozens of concerts, hundreds of artists and thousands of festival-goers. All summer long Rafał Milach, one of the most highly regarded Polish documentary photographers, watched the audiences at Open’er, Audioriver and BitterSweet Festival. The result is the open-air exhibition “Fermata”. The project, initiated by PKO Bank Polski, the main partner of all three festivals, is an attempt to capture the emotions that arise around music.

“Fermata” can be seen in the Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie. The photographs on show were taken at three of this year’s music events: Open’er Festival in Gdynia, Audioriver in Łódź and BitterSweet Festival in Poznań. The exhibition is not, however, a record of the individual festivals. Rafał Milach treats them as a space for observing contemporary forms of community - a momentary escape from everyday life, of meeting and of taking part in a collective experience.

People are at the centre of the project. The photographer watches the festival-goers during concerts, between performances, behind the scenes and on the fringes of the main spectacle. He records emotions, relationships and details that often go unnoticed. He also shows a world closed to most of the festival audience. He looks behind the scenes, watching musicians during rehearsals, preparations and moments of concentration just before they walk on stage. This makes “Fermata” not only a story about festivals but above all about people and the emotions that music can evoke.

The title “Fermata” refers to the musical sign that allows a note or a rest to be held beyond the length written in the score. In Rafał Milach’s project the term takes on a metaphorical meaning. The photographs arrest fleeting moments and let us look at what usually goes unnoticed in the rhythm of a festival.

Showing “Fermata” in the grounds of the Royal Łazienki gives the photographs an additional context. The open-air display places the festival community in the historic setting of a royal residence, setting a contemporary musical experience against a place with centuries of history.

The “Fermata” project was initiated by PKO Bank Polski, the main partner of Open’er, Audioriver and BitterSweet Festival. It sums up this year’s festival summer, during which PKO Bank Polski co-created events combining popular and classical music, including “Chopin at Open’er”, the premiere concert NERVY at Audioriver and the closing project “BITTER Chopin, SWEET Chopin” at BitterSweet Festival.

What to expect

The museum places its Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie, the long avenue running south from the city centre to Łazienki Park, and admission is free.

There are no stages or stars on the panels, only people: audiences during and between concerts, and musicians rehearsing or waiting to go on. The pictures were taken this summer at Open’er in Gdynia, Audioriver in Łódź and BitterSweet Festival in Poznań, but the museum stresses that this is not a record of the festivals themselves.

The museum does not give the number of photographs or name a curator.

It is worth knowing who is behind it. The project was initiated by PKO Bank Polski, the main partner of all three festivals, and the museum describes it as a summing-up of the festival summer the bank co-created. The bank’s own press release names Fotofestiwal, the international photography festival in Łódź, as the project partner.

Context

Rafał Milach was born in Gliwice in 1978 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. In 2006 he co-founded Sputnik Photos, a collective of Central and Eastern European photographers, and in 2019 the Archive of Public Protests, which documents protest movements in Poland. He has been associated with Magnum Photos since 2018.

His work mostly deals with the tension between society and power, and his book “Strike” won the Author Book Award at Rencontres d’Arles in 2022. “Fermata” is a change of subject: instead of protesters, a crowd that came for the music.

Tickets and time

• Free. The museum lists the show as free admission.
• Dates: 1-30 September 2026.
• Where: the Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie. On the Aleje Ujazdowskie side, the museum gives Łazienki Królewskie as the nearest bus stop (lines 116, 166, 180, 195), about 100 m from the park gate by the Chopin Monument.
• How long: 15-20 minutes at a slow walk along the railing.
• Pair it with: the Łazienki gardens, open daily 6:00-22:00 (6 AM - 10 PM) with free entry. On Fridays the museum’s buildings are free too, but only the ground floors are open.
• English on site: the museum’s page about the show exists only in Polish and does not say whether the panels carry English captions.

Who it is for: anyone who follows documentary photography, or who spent this summer at one of these festivals. If you are in Łazienki or walking along Aleje Ujazdowskie anyway, stop and look. It is not worth a trip across the city on its own unless you already know and value Milach’s earlier work.

What the press says

As of 17 September 2026 no reviews had been found. The only text beyond the museum’s page is a press release from the project’s initiator, in Polish:

• MojeBankowanie.pl, PKO Bank Polski press release (3.09.2026): the bank presents the show as the crowning of its festival summer, and Milach says he looked for the moments that happen between concerts - press release

See also

• A Photojournalist at War. 36 Frames - the other show in the same Open-Air Gallery, also until 30 September 2026: photographs by the press correspondents of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
• Stills from the Film Lalka (The Doll) - stills from the new screen adaptation of Prus’s novel, in the same Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie, until 31 October 2026; elsewhere in the park, in the Open-Air Gallery on ul. Agrykola, A History That Flows On marks 140 years of Warsaw’s waterworks until 30 September 2026.
• Elliott Erwitt. Retrospective - the Magnum photographer at the History Meeting House, until 20 September 2026; a different way of photographing ordinary people.
• Together. 20 Years of the Sputnik Photos Collective - the collective Milach co-founded, shown at the Museum of Photography in Kraków; closed on 13 September 2026.

Museum profile: Royal Łazienki Museum.