It’s fitting that artist Sarah Bahbah would release her first book on Valentine’s Day. Not only does the title, Dear Love, nod to the romantic undertones of the day, but it also just so happens to be her favorite holiday. “It’s the one I get the most excited about,” she laughs. The 400-plus-page fine art and photography book is as much an ode to the artist’s successful photography career as it is an autobiography of Bahbah’s 20s—a period marked with love, trauma, heartbreak, hopefulness, and self-discovery. “It had been a decade of shooting and creating, and for me, having all of it in one place and entering my 30s and giving this book to the world, it’s the most profound release I’ve ever had because in this book I uncover so much of my experiences,” she says. To further celebrate, Bahbah developed a short film called Untangled in partnership with Valentino Beauty starring Nailea Devora—and Who What Wear has the exclusive premiere below.
Bahbah grew up in Perth, Australia, an idyllic yet isolating small town by the coast. An introvert surrounded by her loud and chaotic (“in the best ways”) Arab family—her parents immigrated from Palestine and Jordan—she would often find solace by sneaking away to an empty living room to dream up new worlds and romanticize her own experiences. As an adult, this manifested in Bahbah’s love for drama and the arts. She did theater, wrote poetry, painted… Any creative outlet to express herself, she thrived in. She picked up her first camera in high school, and while studying advertising in college, she started a point-and-shoot blog and did fashion shoots on the side. Eventually, she was invited to shoot various musicians and festivals. Her photography career was taking off, but in an effort to refine her art, she created her first photo series, The Wild Ones. From there, her signature style was born.
Bahbah quickly became renowned for her culture-shifting, cinematic-like stills. Subtitles, a window into Bahbah’s innermost dialogue, give voice to her visually striking imagery, which also features some of Hollywood’s most promising young talent. Think Noah Centineo, Dylan Sprouse, Laura Harrier, and Eiza González. With Instagram as her platform, she brought forth a new form of storytelling that was brilliantly optimized for the internet.
“It was my advertising background that actually started to subconsciously influence my art, and I wanted to use my skill in that world to create something that would stand out, especially in 2015 when Instagram was only a few years old,” Bahbah says. “I wanted to challenge the platform by adding subtitles to stills so that when people viewed it they would think they came from cinema because that’s what Tumblr was doing. I thought, ‘You know what? This is genius. I’m going to trick everyone, make it seem like cinema, make it the most cinematic, beautiful shot anyone’s ever seen, and then slap my inner dialogue on it and have people just freak out because the shit that I’m saying is so real and so relatable.’ I started doing these series where I would release over 40 images—one a day for like a month—and every day, people would tune in as they would to a television show, get their subtitle fix, and then they would come back the next day.”
Bahbah has since released 10 subtitled series, including favorites Sex and Takeout and 3ieb! Exploring the power of vulnerability through taboo topics of sex, desire, and liberation, Bahbah’s art has amassed a cult-like following, but perhaps more importantly, it serves as a tool for her to navigate her own mental illness. Having suffered from bouts of obsessive thinking, Bahbah needed an outlet to productively channel her inner thoughts and spiral episodes. “That’s where my dialogue gets born,” she says. “It’s allowing a safe space for my obsessive thoughts. When you see these witty one-liners, it’s usually me trying to reimagine a situation where I said what I wanted to, and that’s how it’s born.”
Dear Love encapsulates Bahbah’s work in gut-wrenching poetic fashion. It is broken up into four main chapters: “Dear Heart,” “Dear Darkness,” “Dear Light,” and “Dear Love,” which she says are based on the human experience and follow the same journey all of her protagonists do. “Dear Heart” represents Bahbah’s coming-of-age years and features her early projects The Wild Ones and Sex and Takeout. “I was so young, and I was falling in and out of love constantly, at least what I thought was love,” Bahbah shares. As you move into “Dear Darkness,” the work gets moodier and more meaningful, a reflection of a difficult period for the artist as she entered therapy and began addressing her trauma, anxiety, and depression. “Dear Light” is the result of that process and the realization that it’s going to be okay. And finally, “Dear Love” is coming back to one’s true self and embracing all of the emotions.
“As scary as it is to have revealed so much of myself in this book, especially in the series synopsis where I break down the story behind every single photo series that I’ve done, I think it’s a risk worth taking,” Bahbah says. “I think vulnerability is a superpower, and having that to reflect on in a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now is just going to be a really special feeling. So I did it for my younger self, and I’m doing it for my future self.”
The self-funded, self-published book is available on Bahbah’s website via a sliding-scale price format, a “pay what you can” initiative she adopted in 2020 in an effort to make her work more accessible to fans.
While Dear Love looks back on Bahbah’s influential career and work thus far, the artist is very much looking forward. Her artistry has long been a series of pivots, and for now, that means closing the door on her photography work to focus on long-form film and TV. “I want to keep telling my story, and I love the idea of trying new executions to do so,” she says. Bahbah has officially entered her directorial era, and we can’t wait to see what the next decade will bring.
Grab your copy of Dear Love here.
