Nikita Teryoshin | Lumix Festival für jungen Bildjournalismus

Nikita Teryoshin
Nothing Personal - the back office of war

A Ukrainian arms representative shows high-ranking South American military officers a model tank at the SITDEF fair in Peru.

At IDEX in Abu Dhabi, a businessman locks up the grenade launchers before calling it a day.

A demonstration battle with live telecasting in an artificial landscape at the opening ceremony of the 2019 IDEX arms fair in Abu Dhabi.

Lunch buffet with naval gun mock-up at the stand of a Swedish manufacturer at Eastern Europe’s largest arms fair in Kielce, Poland.

A boozy party at the stand of a machine-gun manufacturer at the Eurosatory fair near Paris.

A mobile practice target, riddled with bullet holes, at the 2019 AUSA, the largest American arms fair. It takes place in Washington, D.C.

A Korean army officer watches an aerobatics display put on by the Korean Air Force at the ADEX arms fair in Seoul.

A businessman uses his smartphone at the stand of an air-defence systems manufacturer at the SITDEF fair in Peru.

In Kubinka, businesspeople and reporters wait at a bus stop in the Patriot theme park. This park is located near Moscow and operated by the Ministry of Defence. Russia’s largest arms fair, known as “Army”, takes place here.

Firearms demonstration: a Russian general on opening day of the 2017 MILEX arms fair in Minsk, Belarus.

Full camouflage: a Peruvian soldier poses at the SITDEF arms fair in Peru.

A soldier in winter camouflage stalks an artificial palm plant. Virtual encounter at Eurosatory, one of the world’s largest arms fairs. It takes place in Villepinte, a city north of Paris.

A visitor from Lesotho photographs American planes at the African Aerospace and Defence Expo (AAD) in the South African city of Pretoria. It is the largest fair of its kind on the continent.

Visitors to the IDEX Defence Fair in Abu Dhabi watch the opening ceremony of the air show on the first day of the largest arms fair in the Middle East. It takes place here every two years.

Every day, the news shows images from war zones; at the same time, arms exports reach new record highs year after year. With this photo-reportage, Nikita Teryoshin takes a look behind the scenes of the global armaments business. Between 2016 and 2019, he visited selected weapons fairs in Europe, Africa and Asia as well as North and South America; he found huge war playgrounds for adults along with wine, beer and finger food. At these fairs, stage-ready acts of war are performed for high-ranking guests, ministers, heads of state, generals and dealers. Visitors can try handling machine guns and rocket-propelled infantry weapons on screens. The enthusiasm for these gleaming weapons, which may one day appear on battlefields, in civil wars or in the hands of dictators, is great.

Artificiality
Play
Violence
War

3 Questions

1. The door opener: Can you describe a formative moment in your career as a visual journalist?

A formative moment for me was the shitstorm that happened in the Facebook group for picture editors after I had published my brand new photos of the 2016 CDU federal party conference. Most critics didn’t understand the way I had used flash, or the fact that there were also many people who thought the pictures were just great. Some “colleagues” just fooled around in the comment column and private messages. “Enough!”, I thought. I kept going, visiting other party conferences. The result was the series “Game of Chairs – vom Glanz und Elend der Bundesparteitage”. The FUTURZWEI and Business Punk publications made it to the final round of the Nannen Prize, and I was allowed to photograph the 2017 election campaign for the German magazine DER SPIEGEL.

2. The decisive moment: When did you first encounter your topic and why did you decide to cover it photographically?

At the beginning of 2016, I went to a hunting fair in Dortmund; it was being held in the Westfalenhallen next to our university. It really surprised me to see the attraction that the guns on display (hunting rifles) held for the visitors. That gave me the impulse for the series “Sons & Guns”. Even back then, I anonymised the photos of the sons. I couldn’t resist the lure of a professional arms fair, so I visited the largest one in Eastern Europe, which is held in the Polish city of Kielce, in September 2016. When I was a little boy, I liked playing soldier, but since then I had lost interest in the subject. That made it even more fascinating to immerse myself in the world of the global arms trade.

3. The future: What could the visual journalism of the future be like?

I would like it to be colourful, independent, critical, free of dogma and less iconographic, if you please. More pictures that make people think and reveal interrelationships than just emotionalise.

Found in Research

World Press Photo Arward

Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin

Entfesseltes Blitzen

Curated by Amon Kaiser

*1986 in Leningrad, Russia
Nikita Teryoshin studied photography at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts. He describes his long-term documentaries as “street, documentary and everyday horror”. In these projects, he observes the global arms trade or the industrial exploitation of dairy cows. As a freelancer, he works for Süddeutsche Zeitung and ZEIT Magazin, DER SPIEGEL, Stern and other publications. In 2019, he not only took first prize at the Miami Street Photography Festival, he was awarded the PH Museum Grant as well. 2020 he was nominated for the World Press Photo of the Year and won the first prize in the category „Contemporary Issues“.

www.nikitateryoshin.com
@teryoshi

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