The visual universe of artist and photographer Nadia Lee Cohen is a strange coalition that stretches from the quiet of the English countryside to high-profile projects for Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian. With her latest work, Holy Ohio, however, she sets popular culture aside and instead traces her own family heritage while placing the rural heart of the American culture she has long admired under the lens.
Holy Ohio documents Cohen’s deeply emotional return, after a 16-year absence, to her extended family in Ohio, a place she last visited in 1999. On a tree-lined dead-end street where four generations of the same family live in two adjoining houses, she discovers a zone of comfort amid chaos. She is struck by the uncanny sense of continuity she finds there:
“The televisions were on as if they had never been turned off, and the children running around felt like the reincarnation of me, my brother, and our cousins. It was as if the years had never passed; the conversations at the kitchen table simply carried on.”
Cohen’s observation testifies to the power of family ties and memories that transcend time. Though family members have aged, carrying health issues and unresolved conflicts, her presence seems to pause all negativity.
The book itself carries that same spirituality. Published in collaboration with WePresent and IDEA Books, Holy Ohio is designed to resemble a Bible—not only in its physical dimensions but in its graphic style as well. With this volume, Cohen seeks to capture the sacred within the ordinary, the permanence of family bonds, and the honest yet complex iconography of rural America.
Book Summary
Artist/Photographer: Nadia Lee Cohen (British)
Title: Holy Ohio
Publisher: WePresent and IDEA Books
Subject: Family, memory, and the continuity of time in rural America
Release Date: 12 December
