Defence Mechanisms

Venturing inside the arms trade

- TANVI MISHRA

MEN IN CORPORATE SUITS and military outfits, alcoholic drinks perched beside assault rifles—many scenes in the photographer Nikita Teryoshin’s work Nothing Personal–the Back Office of War present a theatre of masculinity. The setting and the actors resemble childhood games with GI Joes, but in this rendition the boys have grown into powerful men, and their toys have evolved from plastic models of soldiers to real missiles and rifles. The performance, no doubt, appears incomplete without a drink in hand.

Photographed at various arms-trading fairs across 13 countries, including Poland, Peru and India, Teryoshin’s images take us “behind the curtains” of the global defence business. He began by shooting what he called the biggest fair in Eastern Europe, in Kielce, Poland, in 2016. Teryoshin’s characters are faceless and nameless, as he cheekily frames them behind a military camouflage mask or weapons on display. “It is not my intention to fix everything upon a certain person,” Teryoshin said, while speaking of his deliberate attempt to explore the larger political, military and corporate systems that propagate this trade instead. His clever obfuscation of these identities finds parallels outside photography too. A text on his website says that a photograph of anonymised traders who appear to have weapons emerging from their heads, could be read as an allusion to an anti-war drawing from the 1930s, titled “Dangerous Dining Companions,” which showed men eating nonchalantly with cannons for heads. “I like the Idea of this symbolism,” Teryoshin writes.