Every day the news shows us images of war and destruction. This coincides with global spending on weapons rising year after year. Yet we are rarely allowed a glimpse behind the scenes of the international arms business. Photographer Nikita Teryoshin travelled to 16 arms fairs between 2016 and 2023 to investigate what happens before wars break out. His aim was to photograph so-called exclusive defence exhibitions, closed to the public, on every continent to highlight the industry's global nature.
Nothing Personal shows war's back office, the exact opposite of a battlefield: an oversized playground for adults with wine, snacks and gleaming weapons. The corpses here are mannequins or pixels on the screens of countless simulators. Bazookas and machine guns are connected to flat screens, and warfare unfolds in an artificial environment before high-ranking guests, ministers, heads of state, generals and dealers.
Teryoshin deliberately obscures the faces of the businesspeople present, since he does not intend to blame individuals. The anonymous arms dealers can be seen as a metaphor for a business operating in the shadows, below the media's radar. His photographs are playful, often focusing on bold graphic angles and visual humour, such as drinks beside machine guns and geopolitical tote bags. The casual nature of his observations, combined with the bright, innocent palette running through the images, forms a sinister contrast with the products on sale. Teryoshin's use of flash highlights particular elements and recalls crime-scene photography.
Teryoshin began photographing all kinds of trade fairs—agriculture, pets, funerals—because his photography school in Dortmund, Germany, stood beside a giant exhibition hall. In 2016 he ended up at a hunting fair, Hunt and dog, and was surprised by how weapons, in this case hunting rifles, attracted visitors young and old. After publishing his series Hijos y armas, he became curious about professional arms fairs. Through his work for VICE Germany, he first obtained press access to Eastern Europe's largest arms fair, MSPO in Kielce, Poland, in September 2016, and the project began. Over several years he visited exhibitions in Poland, Belarus, South Korea, France, Germany, South Africa, China, the United Arab Emirates, Peru, Russia, Vietnam, the United States and India.
"Nowadays companies use slogans such as '70 years defending peace' or 'Engineering a better tomorrow'. It is hard to imagine that some people in the arms industry believe these things. Yet there is a remarkable quotation from machine-gun inventor Richard Gatling: 'It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which, by its rapidity of fire, would enable one man to do as much battle duty as 100, it would largely replace the need for large armies and consequently greatly reduce exposure to battle and disease.' Ironically, rather than reducing the number of soldiers on the battlefield, his invention led to unimaginably greater bloodshed."
