Hrair Sarkissian’s fascination with photography started at a young age. His informal education began while assisting his father in the family-owned studio in Damascus, at the time the first and only colour photo lab in Syria. It was then that he started to use large format cameras to document the social and political realities that surrounded him. These early investigations propelled him to study photography formally at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, where he received a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 2010. His large-scale works engage the viewer in a profound consideration of what lies behind the surface of the images, thereby re-evaluating larger historical or social narratives. Today his work extends to mediums such as video and sculpture. Execution Squares (2008) depicts public execution squares in three Syrian cities: Aleppo, Latakia and Damascus. Photographed in the early morning hours, the quiet images of the empty squares reveal a fragile paradox between the beauty and constancy of the physical environment and the political and social realities they obscure. Using photography as a tool to convince both himself and the audience, Sarkissian demonstrates the continuing existence of the hanged corpses—even after they have been taken away—at the same time as he tries to erase them from memory by using the photographic images as evidence that there are no bodies there.