Nikita Teryoshin
Nothing personal - the back office of war
PHOTO OXFORD OPEN CALL 2025: RUNNER UP
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 21 arms fairs between 2016 and 2025 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. Nothing Personal’ shows the back office of war, which is the complete opposite of a battlefield: an oversized playground for adults with wine, finger foods and shiny weapons. Dead bodies here are mannequins or pixels on screens of a huge number of simulators. Bazookas and machine guns are plugged into flatscreens and war action is staged in an artificial environment in front of high-ranking guests, ministers, heads of states, generals and traders.’
Teryoshin deliberately obscures the faces of the business men and women present as it is not his intention to fix blame on individuals. The anonymised arms dealers can be seen as a metaphor for a business operating in the shadows and under the radar of the media. His photographs are playful and often focus on bold graphic angles and visual humour such as drinks put down alongside machine guns and geopolitics tote bags. The casual nature of his observations combined with the bright innocent colour palette which runs throughout the imagery is a sinister contrast to the goods on sale. Teryoshin’s use of flash helps him to highlight certain elements and is reminiscent crime scene photography.
Over a period of 9 years he visited expositions in Poland, Belarus, South Korea, France, Germany, South Africa, China, UAE, Peru, Russia, Vietnam, USA, India, Greece, Brazil and Spain.
Based in Berlin, Nikita Teryoshin (*1986) was born in Leningrad, USSR. When he was 13-years old his family moved to Dortmund, Germany where he went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Photography. His father Vladimir Teryoshin was a painter and set designer at the theater and television. Visiting his dad's working place, full of requisites and mysterious stuff, made a deep impression on the Nikita.
Since then he remained interested in backstages set up by the media, industry or politics. Also the photographic research on the relationship between humans and animals is a big part of his work.
In 2008 during his studies after first discovering the work and irony of Elliott Erwitt and later Martin Parr and Lars Tunbjörk, he became obsessed with documentary photography. He graduated with ‘Hornless Heritage’ (2014 - 2017), which focuses on the matrix-like world of the moderm dairy cows. "Animal Escape Plan" (2021) shows animals, who managed to escape the slaughter house and survive, to show them not as victims, but as heroes. His recent project "Life Sentence" deals with the artifical worlds of the Zoos. His longest project ‘Nothing Personal’ (2016 - ongoing) deals with the global arms trade. It won the World Press Photo 2020 and has been exhibited and published widely. In 2024 he published his first monograph ‘Nothing Personal - the back office of war’ with GOST books. His clients a.o. are ZEIT, Stern, Spiegel, New Yorker, NYT, GQ, 11Freunde, Bloomberg, SZ, Le Monde.
Insta: @teryoshi
