Nadia Lee Cohen distils a distant American memory into an unflinching new photo book

All artists leave traces of themselves in their work: an emotion, a thought, a memory. There’s a kind of courage, even generosity, in offering up a fragment of yourself in the name of art. British photographer, filmmaker and artist Nadia Lee Cohen has captured countless faces and personas, yet in her character-driven imagery, it’s hard not to glimpse the many versions of herself.

Her first book, Women, published in 2020 by Idea, took six years to realise. Featuring 100 previously unseen portraits of contemporary womanhood, it feels at once vulnerable and brutal, rethinking the pop iconography associated with ‘strong femininity.’ In Julie Bullard, her more recent book in collaboration with Martin Parr, she becomes a fictionalised version of her childhood babysitter, conjuring a honey-toned vision of 1990s Britain. Whether subject or observer, Cohen’s hyper-stylised gaze doesn’t conceal reality so much as amplify it.

Nadia Lee Cohen presents ‘Holy Ohio’

Though her work has always felt deeply personal, her latest project may be the most intimate yet. Created with WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer, and distributed by Idea, it begins at the threshold of memory. In Holy Ohio, Cohen returns to America’s rural heartland to reconnect with a branch of her family, a place she had not returned to since she was a child, more than two decades ago.

Designed to physically echo a Bible, the 150-page volume documents a journey back to a place at once distant and familiar. ‘I last visited my family in Ohio in 1999. Ohio was my first introduction to anything overtly American outside of the television,’ she explains. ‘My mum’s brother moved to Ohio in the early 1990s with his wife and son to join his daughter, her American husband and their children. Eventually, his grandchildren had kids, then the kids had kids, and now the kids’ kids have kids; and now four generations of one family live in two houses right next door to each other on a tree-lined cul-de-sac.’

She recalls the scent of bacon, coffee and pizza – domestic noise as comforting as it was chaotic – yet she avoids the temptation of a rose-tinted family portrait. Instead, she turns towards the dysfunctional, tracing the frictions and eccentricities of Midwestern domestic life. ‘The house was very much alive – there was a cosiness to the chaos, and I was at the age where I found any kind of dispute or dysfunctionality exciting,’ Cohen adds.

Two decades of sporadic contact unfold across images of weathered skin, worn neighbourhoods, patriotic symbols, all-American slogans and a family home seemingly untouched by time. Eclectic possessions reveal the rhythms of a family shaped by an unfamiliar culture for the photographer. Cohen captures these clashing cultural nuances with candour and cinematic tension, her frames washed in a steel-grey melancholy.

‘Holy Ohio’ by Nadia Lee Cohen releases on 12 December, exclusively at Idea Books London, Dover Street Market London, and the Idea Books online store.