Nothing Personal: The Back Office of War

Every day on the news we are shown images of war and destruction. This coincides with global expenditure on arms increasing year after year. However, we are rarely afforded a glimpse behind the curtains of the global arms business.

Photographer Nikita Teryoshin travelled to 16 arms fairs between 2016 and 2023 to investigate what happens before wars take place. His aim was to take photographs at exclusive so-called defence expositions-- which are closed to the public--on every continent to highlight the global nature of the industry.

Based in Berlin, Nikita Teryoshin (*1986) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. When he was 13-years old he moved with his family to Dortmund, Germany where he went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Photography. He graduated with his first long term project ’Hornless Heritage’ (2014 - 2017) which focused on the matrix-like world of the German dairy cow industry. His project ’Nothing Personal - the back office of war’ has been supported by the Stiftung Kulturwerk der VG Bildkunst, a PH Museum Grant and Volkart Stiftung. It has been exhibited in La Chambre Straßburg, France, Bienne Festival of Photography in Switzerland and at Cortona on the Move and PH Museum days in Bologna, Italy.

His work has also been awarded the World Press Photo 2020 first prize in the Contemporary Issues category, nominated for the Picture of the Year, awarded the Miami Street Photography Festival 2019 first prize in Series, World Report Award first prize at Fotografia Etica (IT) 2020, and became Leica Oskar Barnack Finalist 2021. Teryoshin works freelance for publications such as SZ-Magazin, ZEITMagazin, The New Yorker, Der Spiegel and Stern and his personal projects have been published in VICE, Le Monde, ZEIT Magazin, GUP Magazine, It’s Nice That, WIRED, Internazionale and Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. He describes his genres as street, documentary and everyday horror and is a member of Burn My Eye photography collective.