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 (in Poland, Belarus, South Korea, Germany, France, South Africa, China, United Arab Emirates, USA, Peru, Russia, Vietnam and India) 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.


“Nothing Personal shows the back office of war, which is the complete opposite of a battlefield: A oversized playground for adults with vine, fingerfood 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 artifical environment infront of a tribune full of high ranked guests, ministers, heads of states, generals and traders.

I deliberately don't show you the faces of the business men. It is not my intention to fix everything upon a certain person. The anonymized traders with Weapons coming out of their Heads could be seen as a reference to John Heartfield's anti war drawing from the 1930ies before the WW2 "Dangerous Dining Companions". I like the Idea of this symbolism.

Nowadays companies use slogans like, ‘70 years defending peace’ or, ‘Engineering a better tomorrow.’ It is hard to imagine, that some people in the weapons industry believe these things. Still there is a remarkable quote from the inventor of the machine gun Richard Gatling that says: ‘It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine – a gun – which could, by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as 100, that it would, to a large extent, supersede the necessity of large armies and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.’ His motivation was not to accelerate the process of killing, but to save lives by reducing the number of soldiers needed on the battlefield. The future Gatling wrought was not one of less bloodshed however, but unimaginably more. The Gatling gun laid the foundations for a new class of machine; the automatic weapon.”
- Nikita Teryoshin