An intimate and unsettling homecoming, where family, memory and suspended time become the raw material of a new photobook.
Photographer Nadia Lee Cohen has become one of the defining image makers of her generation, known for a cinematic and stylised universe where performance, fiction and Americana collide. With ‘Holy Ohio’, published by WePresent, she reconnects with the tender strangeness of her own family history and returns to Heath, Ohio for the first time since childhood.
Cohen describes her trip to Ohio in 1999 as the moment America became real to her. She remembers fireflies at dusk, the warmth of cousins who felt instantly familiar and a house crowded with objects she was allowed to touch without hesitation. The noise never stopped, shifting from cartoons in the basement to police chases in the kitchen and bad news in the front room. Coming from the quiet English countryside, she felt overwhelmed by the bright American palette, the saturated colours of packaging and signage that made everything feel larger, louder and somehow enchanted.
The return in 2025 was sparked by a phone call from her uncle, the kind that forces a family to move quickly. Cohen feared the house might have changed beyond recognition, yet found the opposite. The same carpet, the same plants, the same kitchen held the space together as if nothing had aged. Time seemed suspended, as though each object had been waiting for her to come back. In her photographs this stasis becomes emotional ground, revealing tenderness, unease and a sense of domestic eternity.
‘Holy Ohio’ unfolds as a portrait of a home where chaos and coziness coexist, where evidence of fragility sits beside the illusion that nothing and no one can truly disappear. It is a story of return, distance and the strange comfort of places that remain exactly as we left them.
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