The Jury of the World.Report Award 2020 unanimously assigned the following awards to:

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• Nikita Teryoshin for the reportage Nothing Personal – the Back Office of War in the Master Award section. The reportage will be exhibited in the next Edition of the Festival of Ethical Photography. The prize will be 3,000 Euros, before taxes and a FUJIFILM X-Pro3 mirrorless camera with XF23mmF2.0 lens;
• Mary Turner for the reportage Dispossessed in the Spot Light Award section. The reportage will be exhibited in the next Edition of the Festival of Ethical Photography. The prize will be 2,500 Euros, before taxes.
• Rosa Mariniello for the reportage Vitiligo in the Short Story Award section. The reportage will be exhibited in the next Edition of the Festival of Ethical Photography. The prize will be 1,500 Euros, before taxes;
• Dario De Dominicis for the reportage To the Left of Christ in the Mother Earth Award section. The reportage will be exhibited in the next Edition of the Festival of Ethical Photography. The prize will be 1,500 Euros, before taxes;
• Ingmar Björn Nolting for the reportage “Measure and Middle” – a Journey through Germany during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Student Award section. The reportage will be exhibited in the next Edition of the Festival of Ethical Photography. The prize will be a FUJIFILM X-T3 mirrorless camera with a XF18-55mm lens.

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For the Single Shot Award  – Giving attention to the values, giving attention to hope:

• Francesca Mangiatordi in the Single Shot Award section. The image will be exhibited in the next Edition of the Festival of Ethical Photography. The prize will be 500 Euros, before taxes.

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Moreover, the top 30 finalists of this section will have their photos exhibited during the 2020 Edition of the Festival of Ethical Photography.

These candidates represent the winners from more than 1050 submissions, 568 photographers from 57 different countries.

The Jury of the World.Report Award 2020 was composed of the following: Sarah Leen – The Visual Thinking Collective, Peter Bitzer – Laif Agency, Aldo Mendichi – Festival della Fotografia Etica, Alberto Prina – Festival della Fotografia Etica.

The images submitted to the Single Shot Award were selected by Alberto Prina in collaboration with the Gruppo Fotografico Progetto Immagine.

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Master Award Winner 2020

Nikita Teryoshin

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Nothing Personal - The Back Office Of War

Everyday on the news we are watching pictures of war and destruction and the expenditure on armaments is setting new records year after year.
Well, let‘s take a look at the other side of the subject – behind the curtains of global defence business. Nothing Personal shows the back office of war, which is the complete opposite of a battlefield: an oversized playground for adults with wine, finger food 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 flat screens and war action is staged in an artificial environment in front of a tribune full of high ranked guests, ministers, heads of states, generals and traders.

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The photographer doesn’t deliberately  show you the faces of the business men. It is not his 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 1930s before the WW2 “Dangerous Dining Companions”. Nikita likes the idea of this symbolism.

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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.
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Still there is an interesting 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.

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The pictures of this project that is still ongoing have been taken so far at 14 defence exhibitions between 2016 and 2020 in Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America (Poland, Belarus, South Korea, Germany, France, South Africa, China, United Arab Emirates, USA, Peru, Russia, Vietnam and India). The final goal of the project is to make pictures on every continent and to underline the global thing of this specific business and to publish as a photo book.

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‍Nikita Teryoshin

Based in Berlin, Nikita Teryoshin was raised in St. Petersburg, Russia and then moved to Dortmund, Germany where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Photography. He describes his work as street, documentary and everyday horror. Teryoshin graduated with his first long term project Hornless Heritage (2014 – 2019) focused on the matrix-like world of the german dairy cow industry, which was exhibited at the Festival of Ethical Photography in 2018. Between 2016 and 2020, he visited 14 Defence Fairs in 13 countries on 5 continents for insight into the global arms trade for his story, ‘Nothing Personal – the backoffice of war’. This work was supported by the VG Bildkunst and a PH Museum Grant. The project has been exhibited in Strasbourg, France and Biel and Geneva in Switzerland and won the german VG Bild-Kunst research grant in 2018, Miami Street Photography Festival 2019 first prize in Series, Kolga Tbilisi in 2020 first prize in Documentary and the World Press Photo 2020 first prize in the category Contemporary Issues and has been nominated for the picture of the year. In September 2019, he participated in the World Press Photo Foundation’s Joop Swart Masterclass, and started the series ‘I’ve never been to Russia’. Teryoshin works as freelance photographer for publications such as SZ-Magazin, ZEITMagazin, GQ, 11Freunde, Der Spiegel and Stern. His personal projects have been published in VICE, Le Monde, Vrij Nederland, ZEIT Magazin, GUP Magazine, WIRED, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.

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