Sarah Bahbah

. This piece demonstrates Bahbah's use of captions on her photographs, and her retro-saturation technique. Bahbah studied creative advertising at Curtin University in Western Australia. During her first year of studies, she began photographing music festivals and cultural events, including Firefly. Writing for Forbes, interviewer Olivia Perez posited that this experience "capturing intimate, private moments within the human experience and bringing them to light" carried forward into her later artwork. Bahbah places subtitles on her photographs to simulate the appearance of a still from a captioned film. She adopted this style with Instagram in mind, after being inspired by posts on the platform sharing screenshots from subtitled foreign films. Bahbah described her works as coming together to "create a serial, episodic quasi-narrative" which is open to interpretation, although "[each] individual piece tells a story on its own". She has expressed that the themes of desire, intimacy, and emotion in her work, and her frequent depiction of taboo subjects such as women's sexuality, stem from the sense of freedom she has gained through her art after being raised in a conservative Christian Middle Eastern household, as a racial minority in a majority-white community. == Career ==

"Sex and Takeout" The series "Sex and Takeout" was created in 2014 while Bahbah was working as an art director at a Melbourne advertising agency. The 26-photograph series features young women in varying states of nudity eating and posing with fast food. The series went viral and Bahbah gained over 50,000 Instagram followers overnight. The images in the series were shared millions of times. In 2019, Bahbah announced that prints of one of her most famous photographs from the series ("Sex and Takeout — Pizza", pictured right), which had previously been available only as an expensive limited-edition print, would be temporarily available at a more affordable price in an effort to "democratize art acquisition". Possy Agency Bahbah established her own creative agency, Possy, in 2016. Through Possy, she has worked with GQ and Vogue, shot ad campaigns for Gucci, and directed three music videos for Kygo songs ("Think About You" with Valerie Broussard and "Not OK" with Chelsea Cutler in 2019, and a remix of "What's Love Got to Do with It" starring Laura Harrier in July 2020). "I Could Not Protect Her" "I Could Not Protect Her" is a visual poem released in 2018 unpacking the artist's trauma from childhood sexual abuse. The photos present the conflicting sentiments felt by the subject; subtitles convey a simultaneous desire for approval from the abuser and a strong detest for his actions. The poem concludes, "I could not protect her, because I could not protect myself." The self-portrait series is the first to feature Bahbah in front of the camera, and the first series in which the photos' subtitles are written in both English and Arabic. "Fool Me Twice" Le projet de Sarah Bahbah, «Fool Me Twice», réalisé avec le soutien de WePresent, est une série photographique explorant la complexité de l'attirance entre individus, s'interrogeant sur les raisons de notre attirance pour les personnes qui nous attirent. Le projet met en vedette Noah Centineo, le petit ami d'Internet, et Alisha Boe, la star de 13 Reasons Why sur Netflix. Il suit l'histoire d'amour d'un couple inspirée par des événements vécus par la photographe elle-même. "Can I Come In" In June 2025, she launched Can I Come In?, a six-part "podcast-cinema-documentary hybrid" series released on YouTube in partnership with WeTransfer's arts platform WePresent. Each episode centres on one of six women - Mia Khalifa, Cindy Kimberly, Nemahsis, Liza Soberano, Banks and Yesly Dimate. == Controversies ==

In 2016, Bahbah's collaboration with Butter, a fried chicken restaurant in Sydney, drew criticism for its display of Bahbah's images of nude women throughout the dining area and on the restaurant's website. Although the restaurant and Bahbah came out in defence of the photographs, with Bahbah explaining her intent to portray female empowerment, some patrons found the restaurant's theming degrading. In 2018, singer Selena Gomez was accused of copying Bahbah's visual style without credit in her music video "Back to You". Bahbah's official response acknowledged that she does not own the use of subtitles on images, but claimed that her "recognizable style of work" has made her the ""go-to for this type of style" as an "industry standard". She further stated that she was "flattered that so many have referenced me in Selena's latest work" and that she was disappointed that the accusations had "overshadowed" her recent work shining a light on child sexual abuse. Gomez never responded to the accusations. == References ==