Although he began taking photographs as a teenager, Sahihi traces the beginning of his professional trajectory to New York City in 1987, a thriving "pop culture metropolis" where he could do the kind of photography work that he wanted to do, exploring the underbelly of the society around him. Taking assignments from German publications such as the Zeitmagazin and Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine, Der Spiegel, DUMMY and Spex, he photographed subjects like prisoners on death row, players in the hip-hop scene, and the downtown art scene of New York. Eventually, he began to receive commissions from American publications as well, including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vice, Rolling Stone, and Vogue.

Put off by the limitations of photojournalism (the expectation that he would illustrate the writer's perspective rather than author a narrative of his own), Sahihi began to embark on independent conceptual series. In the early 2000s, Sahihi has lived and worked in New York, Istanbul, and London, producing bodies of work in each place that attempt to engage the political discourse he deems lacking in substance. Amongst others, he contributed to Istanbul Contrastsund Art and Patronage, both published by Thames & Hudson. In 2011 he followed and documented New York's Occupy Wall Street movement. After moving to Berlin in 2013, he started working on a large scale photo-sociological study dedicated to the cities women and two other series that subsequently were also published as books. He also had his work exhibited several times in Berlin. In March 2020, Sahihi photographed American drag queen, performance artist and musician Christeene for German Interview magazine. A large-scale retrospective of the photojournalistic work was published by DISTANZ in September 2020. The New York Years is a collection of 224 portraits shot in New York since the late 1980s, showing musicians such as David Bowie, 50 Cent, Solange Knowlesand Nick Cave, writers John Irving, Siri Hustvedt and Irvine Welsh, actors Willem Dafoe and John Lurie, as well as artists such as Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and Nam June Paik or galerist and collector Bruno Bischofberger. A selection of about 40 portraits was on display at McLaughlin Berlin in autumn 2020.