Nadia Lee Cohen’s new photography project revisits memory, myth, and the American midwest

In her most personal work to date, photographer and filmmaker Nadia Lee Cohen returns to the American Midwest to unveil Holy Ohio, a deeply intimate photography project shaped by memory, family ties, and the surreal stillness of a place where time appears suspended.

A new Nadia Lee Cohen book rooted in memory

Released on December 12th, 2025, Holy Ohio marks the latest Nadia Lee Cohen book, created in collaboration with WePresent and published by IDEA. The project was born from Cohen’s summer 2025 journey back to Ohio—the first since her childhood visit in 1999. What began as a family trip evolved into a tender visual exploration: a return to her mother’s side of the family, four generations living together on the same quiet cul-de-sac, and a house where almost nothing has changed in 26 years.

Cohen said that returning felt uncanny, as though the carpets, ornaments, ephemera and hum of multiple televisions had remained untouched since her youth. This atmosphere, which was simultaneously warm, chaotic and fixed in time, became the emotional core of the book.

Inside the photography project: a study of time, place, and unvarnished reality

Unlike her previous highly stylised and cinematic works, this photography project trades fantasy for candor. Cohen approached Ohio with minimal staging, opting instead to document the textures of family life: the clutter of familiar rooms, the rhythms of daily noise, the intimacy of reunion, and the subtle tensions beneath it all.

Echoing throughout the images are fragmented childhood impressions of fireflies, bright packaging, loud cartoons, and the sensory overload of her first ‘real’ American experience.

Visual language of the latest Nadia Lee Cohen book

Holy Ohio retains Cohen’s unmistakable eye, yet its visual language is more restrained than her usual technicolor surrealism. The book is crafted to resemble a Bible, with a white recycled leather cover and carefully selected archival papers that add weight and sacredness to the experience. Inside, the photographs blend soft naturalism with her signature sense of atmospheric tension—quiet portraits, unguarded gestures, objects frozen in their original places for decades.

Discover our interview with Nadia Lee Cohen, a storyteller who bends time, space, and aesthetics with effortless boldness. Inside, she delves into the rules she wishes she had for the past, the boundaries that shape her work, and her unapologetically sharp take on society.