I Take Pictures Of Barbies To Highlight Issues On Mental Health And Societal Pressures

by Patrick Penrose Published Nov 12, 2025

I’ve had an interest in photography for as a long as I can remember, but I never gave myself the chance to properly pursue it until May 2017.

I was spending a few months in Canada with my brother after having completed my undergraduate studies in Landscape Architecture. I left Beirut at the beginning of February and didn’t go back until the end of May.

During my stay, I felt like I needed to keep myself busy with something, so I bought myself a used camera and I haven’t put it down since.

Around that same time, I wasn’t feeling too well mentally- I didn’t have a lot of friends in Montreal and that brought me down a lot. Also, coincidentally, a lot of my friends were struggling with their own mental health issues: depression, anxiety, eating disorders etc. My friends and I always tackled these issue with a bit of humor- it made things less daunting. I wanted to translate that visually.

I had written down some sentences my friends and I had sent each other and decided to craft a picture out of them.

…and then I saw a Barbie commercial.

I just felt right to have something so universal be the “spokesperson” to all of our inner demons whilst making the whole thing seem less scary and even funny at times.

I asked around for some old used barbies, got myself a few large pieces of paper to use as a backdrop, set the whole thing up in my room, and then it just happened. I’m releasing them one day at a time with intervals in between each set of 3 to 6 on my instagram @razanehanna, and I’m working on another set of images for the series.

I’m open to anyone who wants to send me some sentences to translate visually for this project.

More info: Instagram