Nothing Personal – the back office of war is a long-term documentary project by Nikita Teryoshin, made between 2016 and 2023 across roughly 20 arms fairs in 18 countries, where he photographs the trade-show infrastructure that markets weapons long before they appear on battlefields.
Working inside these closed "defense" expos, Teryoshin examines how violence is packaged as routine business: hospitality suites, corporate booths, and product demos that treat lethal technology as a neutral commodity. The project frames this as a contemporary condition of militarization, where public attention often focuses on combat imagery while the commercial negotiations that precede conflict remain comparatively obscured. Borrowing Hannah Arendt’s phrase "banality of evil," the series asks how moral distance is produced when harm is converted into contracts, branding, and sales targets.
That distance is built into the pictures’ visual logic. The photographs lean on saturated color and direct, frontal flash that flattens space and sharpens surfaces—polished metal, laminated brochures, catering trays—so the showroom reads as both clinical and theatrical. Teryoshin frequently stages visual collisions: a wine glass near a rifle, a coffee cup on a missile, mannequins and simulators standing in for bodies. Faces are often hidden by cropping or by objects held close to the camera (iPads, weapons, signage), shifting attention away from individual psychology toward the anonymity of a system.
Technique reinforces this "back office" perspective. Teryoshin works primarily with digital cameras, often using a 50mm lens or a practical 24–70mm zoom. He commonly shoots with a closed aperture for deep focus and uses off-camera flash—camera in one hand, flash in the other—to control shadows and isolate details.
The series helped establish Teryoshin, who describes his approach as "street, documentary, and everyday horror," as a notable voice in contemporary documentary practice. It won first prize in the Contemporary Issues category at the 2020 World Press Photo Awards and was a finalist for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2021.
