Nadia Lee Cohen on her ‘most personal project yet’

Nadia Lee Cohen is beloved for her stylised, cinematic vision, synthesising a distinct constellation of unique references – everything from Hollywood regency to 90s Essex pop culture, hyperreal Americana, peep shows, working men’s clubs and more; all shot through with her impeccable eye for glamour and dark humour. 

Previous photo books, such as Women, or Julie Bullard, her collaboration with Martin Parr, both draw on elements of real life – the characters Cohen herself portrays in Women are all assembled from items and personal effects she finds at flea markets; Julie Bullard was Cohen’s real babysitter, re-enacted by Cohen and shot by Parr in a series of 90s-inspired scenes of family life in Essex. 

Her latest project, Holy Ohio (brought to you by IDEA and WePresent), is a work of non-fiction. It’s less theatrical and more deeply personal, drawing more directly on her own memories and history than any previous photo series. There’s a semi-gratuitous nun costume, sure. But there are none of the prosthetics or characters you’d expect to encounter in a Nadia Lee Cohen book. Instead, Holy Ohio is a very tender account of Cohen’s experiences of revisiting a significant lieu de mémoire. 

She was just a kid when Cohen’s mum took her out to visit family in a town called Heath in Columbus, Ohio, and the trip made a lasting impression on her. Outside of television, it was her first exposure to anything “overtly American”. Fragmented recollections of the place lived on in her memory, but she never imagined returning ever again. Until recently, when her uncle in Ohio fell ill and she made the trip out there once more, hoping to reconcile the place she encountered with that which existed in her memory. This time, she took her camera with the intention of capturing something of the house and the surrounding town that had subtly haunted her since childhood.

Below, we talk to Nadia Lee Cohen about Holy Ohio, the lure of nostalgia, corn sweat, and how it felt to revisit a place that has loomed so large in her lore...

Please could you introduce us to Holy Ohio?

Nadia Lee Cohen: It’s a collection of photos from a town called Heath in Columbus, Ohio. Most are photographs of my uncle’s family, and the rest are just things or people that I liked the look of. It’s probably my most personal project to date in terms of its candidness and lack of staging.

After the 1999 trip, I didn’t think we’d ever go back to Ohio – not for any particular reason other than it just hadn’t occurred to any of us, and life got in the way. One afternoon in 2025, my uncle called my mum on the landline to tell her, ‘I’m dying, goodbye.’ This matter-of-fact dramatic declaration is okay to find funny if you know my uncle, and not necessarily something to take entirely seriously, as he’d said it before. But I watched my mum after that particular phone call, and I knew this time she realised she might actually never see her brother again. That phone call was the catalyst to go back and take pictures and happened to be around the same time as Wepresent asked if I wanted to make a book.

How has Ohio lived on in your memory and imagination since that initial childhood visit? 

Nadia Lee Cohen: Ohio was my first introduction to anything overtly American outside of the television. My mum’s brother moved to Ohio in the early ’90s with his wife and son to join his daughter, her American husband, and their children. His kids had kids, those kids had kids and now there are four generations of one family who live in two houses right next door to each other on a tree-lined cul-de-sac.

We went to visit them in 1999. I have fragmented memories of fireflies, maple trees, instant friendships with cousins, and my uncle’s house crammed with ornaments and heaps of stuff we were never told off for playing with. I don’t remember it ever being quiet; my parents and my uncle’s family would sit around the kitchen table talking and, as you walked through the house, the noise from one television would fade and reach a crescendo as you approached a new room. Cartoons in the basement blended into a police chase in the kitchen and then merged with bad news in the front room.

I remember the smell of bacon, coffee, or pizza, depending on the time of day. Kids would be running around, squealing. The house was very much alive – there was a cosiness to the chaos though, and I was at the age where I found any kind of dispute or dysfunctionality exciting.

What role does nostalgia have in your work, and what relationship do you have to it?

Nadia Lee Cohen: I think it’s integral for me to be reminded of something in any art or film that I consume and am interested in. There is a déjà-vu type of strangeness to nostalgia because it reminds us of somewhere we have been before. But our memories are often a fragmented or inaccurate reconstruction of the truth, and that concept is something that continually interests me and informs a lot of what I do.

How did it feel to return to Ohio? Was it how you remembered?

Nadia Lee Cohen: Nostalgic! Obviously, I wasn’t taking pictures in 1999 but my dad took a lot of VHS footage, so my memories of that trip were documented and validated by the grainy tapes. I always knew what an effect it had on me from looking back at them. The idea of going back 25 years later to document my mum’s reunion with her brother just felt important. I had a fear that when we returned, Ohio might be gentrified or maybe my uncle had decided to renovate the house into something Ikea-esque and drastically different, or that everyone would be walking around wearing horrible workout gear.

But it was the opposite. When I walked into that house in Heath, it felt like time had stopped since 1999. The same green carpet, wooden kitchen, paintings, antiques, ephemera, and plants that hadn’t aged a day– a kind of vortex where everything would remain the same forever. And if I returned in another 25 years, I imagine it would still be the same.

What were some of your favourite things about Ohio? What did you like about it? What’s the atmosphere or distinct character of it?

Nadia Lee Cohen: I like the outdatedness, the separation between the houses, the loyalty people seem to have to it, and the lack of urgency to leave. It really is impossible to describe the atmosphere because it was so personal and clouded with sentimentality. But there is something significant about the physical atmosphere that I can try to describe. The entire visit I felt damp, like a tropical climate – this weird icky feeling. We were staying on a lake, so I thought it had something to do with that. I would shower two or three times a day and started to feel crazy because ten minutes later I felt that strange dampness on my skin again. I brought it up with my cousin, and she casually explained that ‘that’ll be the corn sweat’. I learned it’s this biblical-like phenomenon that happens every year in the Midwest. The corn sweats like a human, leaving the entire atmosphere feeling like it’s been covered by a damp towel. There’s no getting away from it. It’s hard to explain, but once I learned about it, everything else just made sense.

I love your appearances in the book (the nun!). Can you tell us about some of those characters?

Nadia Lee Cohen: I happened to have that nun habit with me from LA and decided to put it on for a picture. It’s not that significant, but when I was going through the images – learning about the Amish community, the corn sweat, our pilgrimage back there, conversations about mortality, and looking at the body of work as a whole – there were just so many Biblical references that there was nothing else the book could have looked like other than a Bible.

What stories do you think emerge in the book?

Nadia Lee Cohen: Well, I associate stories with fiction, and for once that isn’t what this is. It’s a sentimental documentation of complicated relationships and an attachment to a place. Like a dream where you can float out of your body and see the room, the people in the room, the conversations and situations from as much of an observational perspective as I could achieve – even though the subject is something that is very close to me.

What continues to obsess and fascinate you as an artist?

Nadia Lee Cohen: Us, humans. Morality. Mortality. Religion. Artifice. Secrecy. Sexuality. Not in that order!

What’s next? What are you working on or planning?

Nadia Lee Cohen: A big, tacky Ibiza-themed birthday party. 

Holy Ohio is brought to you by IDEA and WePresent and is available here now