Photography Is Not the Point: An Interview with Rafał Milach

ksenia-milach-fot-rafal-milach.jpeg, default, ‘Ksenia’ by Rafał Milach, from the series ‘The Winners’, photo: courtesy of the artist

#photography

A young woman raps about Lukashenko’s production plans, wins a presidential pen – then turns up on the protest barricades eight years later. For Magnum photographer Rafał Milach, that about-turn unlocked something he’d been circling for 15 years.

Michał Dąbrowski: We’re talking just as your Madrid exhibition opens at the PhotoEspaña festival, which runs from 5 June until the end of September. What are you showcasing there?

Rafał Milach: To put it very briefly: the exhibition is devoted to tensions between state authorities and society. For over 15 years, I’ve been looking, on the one hand, at systems of propaganda and control, and, on the other, at various strategies of protest employed by grassroots social movements. Until recently, these two areas seemed difficult to combine.

MD: The title of the Madrid exhibition – ‘Refusal: Second Fracture’ – refers to your 2017 show ‘Refusal’. Back then, what piqued your interest was a refusal to be photographed from an udarnik, a farm labourer. You interpreted it as a form of subtle rebellion, a crack in the system.

RM: That’s right – that was the first crack. In Spain, the series The Winners, which has been around for 15 years now and which I considered a finalised piece that afforded no re-readings, has gained new significance. Quite unexpectedly, the questions of protest and propaganda got intertwined in the life of one of my protagonists, Ksenia, whom I photographed over 13 years ago as a model, pro-regime activist. Her music video I’m the Leader, I’m from the Village – in which she raps about production plans and the moral principles advocated by the Belorussian regime – went viral in 2012, watched by over 1.5 million internet users. That was when Ksenia won the competition for ‘Leader of the Year’ and was gifted a pen with an inscription from President Lukashenko himself. But then, in 2020, I found out that she had joined the mass protests against Lukashenko’s regime, and that she now considers that music video of hers a subversive, critical piece.

Ksenia’s about-turn became the titular second fracture, which enabled me to finally tie the themes of propaganda and resistance together into one whole.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

‘Vasiliy, The Best Police Officer in Minsk’, from the series ‘The Winners’, photo: Rafał Milach

Picture image

winners_008-s.jpg

MD: How did you translate the move from the façade of the regime to street protest into gallery space?

RM: Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer is first confronted with the ‘systemic’ façade built around the old project The Winners. However, it begins to disintegrate in front of their very eyes – through Ksenia, the exhibition moves towards the space of grassroots social movements and protests, not only the 2020 ones in Belarus but more broadly, including also ones from Poland, related to women’s rights, LGBT+ rights or the anti-war protests in Kyiv.

The form of the exposition is very unusual compared to my other work. The presence of photographs was reduced to just a fragment of the series The Winners, with the space filled by large-scale murals depicting the protesters and their demands. Photos from the demonstrations are now available only in the Archive of Public Protest’s Strike Newspapers, placed on specially designed displays with flags used at the protests. The whole is complemented by video materials from the protests, which additionally create the exhibition’s soundscape. A separate exhibition room features a video from the performance Seeding, which I created together with Karolina Gembara in the Mai Mano Haz gallery in Budapest in 2018. It’s another, next to the mural Tears, reference to the series of Black Protests.

Video embed

Xenia ENG SUB.mp4

PMD: We held our last conversation during the pandemic, in 2020; since then, history has further accelerated, both in Poland and abroad. As a documentalist, do you appreciate the fact that you live in ‘interesting times’?

RM: We live in difficult, demanding times – on a fundamental human level, I’d rather our reality was more boring. On the other hand, it’s a liminal moment for us not only to comment on current affairs but also to make a real intervention in the socio-political space.

The turning point for me as an artist was the Black Protest of October 2016 [nationwide mass protests against further restrictions to Poland’s abortion laws – ed.]. It was the first time I got the impression that something akin to a new civil society was emerging, and the photographs I took successfully convey the atmosphere of those events.

However, it wasn’t a calculated action to take up activism or to become a ‘protest photographer’. My presence at those demonstrations and the establishing of the Archive of Public Protests had nothing to do with the format of a creative project. I was first and foremost aiming to join the social movements and offer visual support for their particular demands. At no stage was this meant to be exclusively about photography.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Rafał Milach’s exhibition ‘Refusal: Second Fracture’, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, photo: Rafał Milach

Picture image

CBA_2026_005-s.jpg

MD: So is it fair to say that, thanks to those protests, you became more of an actor than a spectator?

RM: Yes and no. Together with my colleagues from the Archive of Public Protests, I did join the resistance movement, but the engagement was never about us, nor was it meant to be. It’s not a story of the people who document those events, not even about the banner-holding individuals depicted in the photographs. It’s a story about particular values, demands and issues – which, after all, are still relevant today.

Our role – that of the people holding the cameras – has always been and continues to be purely utilitarian. With the help of photographs, placards, videos and installations set up in urban and institutional space, we strive to reinforce the emotions and values that we borrow from the protesters.

I have the impression that the time of the COVID-19 pandemic marked a culmination of several protest movements. What compounded it was the enormous tension between society and the state, caused, for instance, by the introduction of an even more restrictive abortion law or the rise of homophobia in the public discourse of that time’s authorities. Added to that were the restrictions related to the pandemic itself. Public assemblies consisting of more than five people became illegal, which probably further incentivised people to take to the streets. Nowadays, protests are smaller and less visible, and the language employed by the government has visibly softened, but at the end of the day, none of the fundamental issues addressed at that time has been definitively solved.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Rafał Milach’s exhibition ‘Refusal: Second Fracture’, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, photo: Rafał Milach

Picture image

CBA_2026_001.jpg

MD: The projects you refer to – ‘Refusal’ and ‘The Winners’ – emerged in a now distant geopolitical reality. Since 2022, rockets and drones have been falling on Ukraine. I know you’ve been there. What did you see?

RM: First of all, I don’t go to Ukraine on commission. Rather, my trips are motivated by an instinct that I developed while working with the Archive of Public Protests – the impulse to react quickly to what’s happening around me. When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, I was at the Polish-Ukrainian border the very next day. However, I didn’t immediately go any further. I don’t venture into the regions of direct combat because I’m too afraid, I cannot navigate them and I think my colleagues do it way better than I do.

Still, I felt the need to see and experience what happens in civilian areas, far from the frontline. To date, I’ve mostly been travelling to the Kyiv region, motivated in part by the notion that the reality of people who live there might, with time, become our Polish reality too. I wanted to see how people deal with permanent tension and peril, even if they are far from the frontline.

Once there, I photograph pretty much everything: people, places – I collect their stories. I’m never in hotels – I always stay with friends, in ordinary neighbourhoods. Something that keeps cropping up in my pictures are air-raid shelters. Basements in residential blocks, corridors that turn into a space of safety, a place of survival.

My travels are also tied to the process of domesticating my own fear. I remember my first stay in Lviv in March 2022. I was absolutely terrified when I heard an air-raid siren at 3am and there was no air-raid shelter in the building. I opened a special app on my phone, I took two minutes to pack, and I ran downstairs in full gear. It was dark out in the street, it was curfew, and I didn’t even have a press pass. I ran around in the middle of the night with my backpack on, I pounded at the locked door of the neighbouring tenement, trying to get someone to let me into the shelter. I was the only person out there in the street. Today, the situation seems funny to me, but at that moment I was scared to death. With each subsequent visit, I’ve learned to function there.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Rafał Milach’s exhibition ‘Refusal: Second Fracture’, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, photo: Rafał Milach

Picture image

CBA_2026_003.jpg

MD: In 2023 you became a full member of the international agency Magnum. This guarantees you recognition and prestige, and it makes your voice more prominent. But does it influence what you photograph and how?

RM: I’ve never had the impression that Magnum forces me to think in any particular way or to identify with any specific values. People often think of this agency as a monolith, but in reality, it’s a highly varied group, both with regard to photographic practices and views. Membership in the agency has provided me with access to a global mainstream platform that has considerable potential for reinforcing what I do locally, for example in Poland.

MD: Do you feel like an ambassador of Polish photography?

RM: I like a description that I once heard and often repeat: ‘I’m widely known in narrow circles.’ I function in a particular environment, which I try to influence. I’ve long ceased to participate in the traditionally-understood press photography market.

For the past 20 years, my work has been mostly collective – first at Sputnik Photos, then at the Archive of Public Protests. Even when I happen to initiate certain actions, it’s a shared effort from the very start. I could never handle these subjects on my own. It’s always about building a community within the framework of which it’s easier to survive or to strengthen the common voice.

In the context of Magnum, I mostly view myself as an ambassador of the problems that concern us here in our region. I want to make use of this situation and the fact that I’m recognisable – not to build a monument for myself or to reinforce my position, but to be able to raise awareness of our local issues and struggles worldwide. I see real value in this, and that’s how I understand the point of my presence here.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Rafał Milach’s exhibition ‘Refusal: Second Fracture’, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, photo: Rafał Milach

Picture image

CBA_2026_009.jpg

MD: Sputnik Photos is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. At the beginning of your collaboration, you more frequently launched communal projects, related, for instance, to Belarus or Iceland. Nowadays you work differently, and you tell stories differently too. From a classic collective of documentalists creating closed, original series, you became an educational and research platform – you hold workshops, print zines, and organise performances.

RM: Every historical moment and situation requires a different language. Twenty years ago, the format of the photo report and documentary was natural to us. Today, we employ a wide range of different forms and artistic strategies. Nonetheless, our main goal and the problems we explore have essentially remained the same. From the very beginning, we’ve been commenting on the societal condition of East-Central Europe. We attempt to diagnose how we handled the economic transformation and how we continue to deal with the space of freedom and citizens’ rights that the generation of our parents fought for. All that changes are the tools, context, and ways of talking about these phenomena.

MD: At some point, there was a shift in Sputnik – in 2017, at the ‘Lost Territories’ exhibition, you moved away from projects signed by particular artists towards communal ones.

RM: We began that project in 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. A few years later, Paweł Szypulski devised an open source concept, a kind of flexible archive. We realised that it’s incredibly difficult to talk about the complexity of the enormous post-Soviet region by employing only one closed narrative by a single author, so we found Paweł’s proposition really interesting.

For me personally, working in this open formula enacted a real breakthrough in my thinking about photography and construing history. This format involves not only flexibility in shaping multi-level narratives but also a shifting of attention from the author to the problem itself.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

‘Olga’, from the series ‘The Winners’, photo: Rafał Milach

Picture image

milach_thewinners_www.jpg

MD: What character traits are key in your work? Attentiveness, attunement to public sentiment?

RM: Although I have over 20 years of experience working on various photography projects, I must admit I’ve no control over it whatsoever. With each new endeavour, I find myself surprised. I never would’ve planned to photograph protests, much less travel to a war zone. This conflict, however, came right to our door. Similarly, the political situation in Poland after 2015 activated in me a completely new way of thinking with images.

I think it’s about an authenticity of some sort, about attentiveness and flexibility towards what’s happening. I hope I don’t lose this ability with time. I try to follow my intuition. It’s neither pure emotion nor cold, intellectual diagnosis. It’s a kind of sixth sense that enables me to anticipate certain things.

That’s what happened in Belarus. I went there with the intention of photographing personal, familial subjects. Once there, I abandoned my original plan and created the series The Winners, which turned out to be accurate commentary on the local socio-political reality. This experience, in turn, transformed my entire practice. I began to explore systemic structures, propaganda, and gestures of resistance. So, if I were to name one key characteristic of my approach, I would point to flexibility.

_{Interview conducted in Polish, June 2026, translated frominto English by Anna Potoczny, June 2026}

Language English

sputnik photos

documentary photography

rafał milach