Together. 20 Years of the Sputnik Photos Collective

From 11 April to 13 September 2026, MuFo on Rakowicka Street showed twenty years of work by the Sputnik Photos collective - its six members and three other artists, in four sections arranged by ways of working together rather than by date.

The Museum of Photography in Krakow on the exhibition (translated from the Polish original):

For Sputnik Photos, photography has never been merely a record of reality. It is a space of encounter, a tool of critical thinking and of joint action. The exhibition “Together” at the Museum of Photography in Krakow tells the story of the work of one of Central and Eastern Europe’s most important photographic collectives, presenting photography as a medium of relationships, shared responsibility and giving voice to others.

The exhibition “Together. 20 Years of the Sputnik Photos Collective”, presented at the Museum of Photography in Krakow from 11 April 2026, is not a conventional retrospective. The group’s body of work becomes a starting point for reflecting on how documentary photography has changed over two decades and how it can function as a living social practice. The projects on show form a panorama of different models of collaboration: among photographers, the women and men who appear in the pictures, and curators. At the same time, they reveal the social and political transformations of the Central and Eastern European region, seen from the perspective of an engaged, collective creative practice.

What to expect

The exhibition was not a conventional retrospective but a reflection on how documentary photography changed over two decades. The projects on show formed a panorama of different models of collaboration - between makers, the subjects of the pictures, and curators - presenting photography as a living social practice. The collective’s current members are Jan Brykczyński, Karolina Gembara, Michał Łuczak, Rafał Milach, Adam Pańczuk and Agnieszka Rayss. The show was curated by Marta Szymańska, with Dr Agnieszka Olszewska as content adviser.

It came with a recorded audio conversation with the artists, an easy-to-read text version, and Polish Sign Language interpretation. The MuFo reading room on floor +1 held more of the collective’s publications for visitors to browse.

The museum’s archived exhibition page (in Polish): “Wspólnie. 20 lat kolektywu Sputnik Photos” .

Context

Sputnik Photos is an international documentary photography collective founded in 2006 by Agnieszka Rayss, Jan Brykczyński and Rafał Milach, later joined by photographers from Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Belarus, Latvia and Georgia. The group documents social and political change across former Eastern Bloc countries, working across photography, film and photobooks - eight of the latter so far, including the widely noted “Lost Territories Archive”, a body of thousands of photographs taken between 2008 and 2016 in former Soviet republics by seven photographers from Poland, Slovakia and Belarus. Members have picked up awards including World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year International, which makes “Together” a survey of one of the region’s best-known photography collectives rather than the debut of an unknown name.

Tickets and time

“Together” was a paid temporary exhibition, separate from general admission: a standard ticket cost 20 PLN, a reduced one 14 PLN, and the museum’s page listed no free-admission day covering this show, so the fee applied whenever you went. A visit that did justice to the captions and the reading room took at least an hour to ninety minutes.

It suited visitors interested in documentary photography, recent Central and Eastern European history, and questions about the ethics of representation. It worked less well as a quick detour while sightseeing, since the material asked for attention and reading time.

What the press says

• Magazyn SZUM (11 Sep 2026, Wojciech Albiński, Polish outlet): mixed - praises the technical craft and the collective’s sincere intentions, but sees in the collective’s commitment a kind of “not necessarily conscious conformism,” reading more as urban middle-class self-affirmation than genuinely investigative work - link
• Tygodnik Powszechny (31 Mar 2026, Jacek Taran, Polish outlet): in an interview with curator Marta Szymańska, describes the show as in some sense a career overview, but arranged around a logic of collaboration rather than chronology - built on four themes: collaboration with subjects, shared authorship, solidarity activism, and present-day resonance - link

Updates

• 2026-09-22 - the exhibition closed on 13 September 2026; the museum’s exhibition page (Polish only) still gives the dates 11 April - 13 September 2026, and MuFo’s list of current exhibitions no longer includes it.

See also

• Museum of Photography in Krakow (MuFo) - profile of the museum behind this exhibition.
• “Zofia Kulik. Zamiast rzeźby. Przypisy” (“Instead of Sculpture. Footnotes”) - the next temporary exhibition at MuFo on Rakowicka Street (3 October - 20 December 2026), on the museum’s Polish-only site; it, too, pairs photography with collective work.

After the show

“Together. 20 Years of the Sputnik Photos Collective” closed on 13 September 2026. The museum has announced neither a further venue nor a catalogue, and no attendance figures or awards were found.

MuFo’s building on Rakowicka Street still has its core exhibition, “Co robi zdjęcie?” (“What does a photograph do?”): about 1,000 objects on how photography works, from glass negatives to prints by Zofia Rydet and Jerzy Lewczyński. Admission to it is free on Tuesdays, and about ninety minutes is a realistic visit - details in our profile of the Museum of Photography in Krakow .

From 3 October to 20 December 2026, level -1 will host “Zofia Kulik. Zamiast rzeźby. Przypisy” (“Instead of Sculpture. Footnotes”; the museum’s page is in Polish only): the artist’s 1971 diploma work alongside “Footnotes”, prepared jointly by an Open Working Group. Entry comes with a core-exhibition ticket or costs 5 PLN, and the opening is on 2 October 2026 at 18:00. If collective work is what drew you to Sputnik Photos, this is the closest follow-up in the same building.

Interviewed by Jacek Taran in Tygodnik Powszechny (31 March 2026), curator Marta Szymańska described the show as a best-of selection, but one arranged around collaboration, in four sections. In Magazyn SZUM (11 September 2026), Wojciech Albiński called his impressions mixed: he found the show a coherent picture of twenty years of the artists’ social sensitivity, yet read their commitment as a kind of “not necessarily conscious conformism” towards accepted norms.

For art made together, or stories told in the voices of the people they concern, three other Krakow temporary exhibitions are still open:

• The State of Possession. The Topography of the MOCAK Collection - Part 1 (MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art, until 18 October 2026) - made by the museum’s whole team, so collective work again, this time on the institution’s side.
• Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka. Ecologies of Togetherness (MOCAK, until 18 October 2026) - a year-long residency in which process and collaboration count for more than a finished object.
• Hotel Forum (Podgórze Museum, until 10 January 2027) - the story of Krakow’s brutalist riverside hotel told through its former staff, which, as with Sputnik Photos, lets the people concerned speak.

Museum profile: Museum of Photography in Krakow (MuFo) .