Holy Cowtown: On Nadia Lee Cohen’s “Holy Ohio”

---

People can be rude about my being from Ohio. I don’t understand why. It is a relatively dense swing state where the demographics around the capital so closely resemble those of the whole country that fast food companies use the Columbus area to test new products. Yet Ohio is perceived so negatively that in youth slang it means something like “cringe.” 

I find myself leaning into the assumptions. I describe the place I grew up, an exurb between Cincinnati and Dayton, as an old farm town. I exaggerate my twang a little, like how my grandparents sound, when I tell a story about someone drinking the gravy while the whole family had our eyes closed saying grace at KFC. My last name, Hickman, is the name of the holler in Eastern Kentucky where my grandpa grew up. Tyler Childer’s Hickman Holler record label and opioid relief fund and at least two online hillbilly lol-cow characters share the same name. 

But I know I’m lying when I present myself this way. My hometown is so downright Rockwellesque, they shoot Hallmark movies there. My sisters and I got what we wanted for Christmas. We took beach vacations. Our family paid our college tuition. I had too good of a childhood to have a chip on my shoulder. 

Even so, I felt some righteous indignation when I saw the images in Holy Ohio, Nadia Lee Cohen’s new photobook documenting her two visits to an uncle living in the town of Heath. In this book, Cohen, who is notoriously private about her family and upbringing, is suddenly sharing intimate photos of her uncle’s home and video stills from her visit in 1999 when she was a child. I immediately felt I understood what Cohen was trying to do with these images because I related to her self-conscious urge to self-mythologize around the idea of having roots in a downtrodden, seemingly more authentic place. 

Holy Ohio is far from the first time Cohen has turned an unflinching eye to the unglamorous mundane. In Hello My Name Is, Cohen donned fat suits and prosthetics to transform into an array of characters inspired by thrifted name tags. Her service industry caricatures include collections of their imagined embarrassing possessions: laxatives, a coupon cutter, a silicone bra insert. Erin F. O’Leary, in her piece on the show for LA Contemporary Art Review, criticized the classist voyeurism, pointing out the stark contrast between how Cohen photographed herself in these blemished disguises and how Cohen appeared with her father in a head to toe Gucci on the cover of luxury fashion magazine Numéro Berlin,4 that same year. O’Leary described Cohen’s work as, “punching down, involving herself in revealing the (imagined) vulnerabilities of others while not implicating herself in any capacity.” 

Perhaps as a response to this perception of punching down, Cohen has accentuated tenuous personal connections to the down to earth subjects of her more recent work. A 2025 collaboration with the famed documentary photographer Martin Parr, a photobook titled Julie Bullard, was named after Cohen’s childhood babysitter. Cohen is cast as Julie, a young woman in a heightened time capsule of 1990s working class Essex.

While I possess no definitive proof that Nadia Lee Cohen comes from wealth, the clues are there. Cohen is the daughter of a Ukrainian British mother and Moroccan Israeli father and grew up in an isolated “old farmhouse that [her] mom and dad were continually renovating” in the English countryside. The adults around Cohen had careers in the arts, her mother worked in animation and her uncle was Playboy’s caricaturist in the early 1960s. Beyond that, her biography  —  fashion styling and photography at London College of Fashion then jetting off to LA  — simply doesn’t make sense without the lubrication of wealth and connections. 

Suffice to say, Cohen did not grow up in a working class Essex terraced row home. She was not married off in an “Up the Junction” style pregnant scramble to the altar before her untimely death. This is the fictional narrative she invents for Julie in the faux family album. Despite Cohen’s insistence in interviews that Julie exists as a specter of glamour in her memory, the images tell a different story. The inclusion of omnipresent cheap kitschy baubles read as a mean-spirited joke at Julie’s expense. Cohen describes the moments of Julie’s fictional life captured in the photobook as “moments that I experienced or am familiar with throughout my upbringing, whether personally or vicariously” and one must wonder what that ratio was. 

In Holy Ohio, Cohen is again insisting upon a deep connection to a place she is actively othering. She is both the photographer framing ironic images of gun-filled rooms and lung-shaped ashtrays, as well as the subject, posed in an exaggerated hillbilly costume. If Cohen’s objective with these projects were to explore childhood memories or rural life in general, why not return to the farmhouse she grew up in? Why instead branch out into her babysitter’s imagined home and the town where her maternal uncle lives, other than to exploit these settings for the purpose of building her brand?

In Holy Ohio, it is obvious that Cohen has only a passing familiarity with Ohio. From what I could tell, after an evening of geo-guessing, besides the pictures taken in private homes, most photos are of locations you could spot from the car on a single drive up State Route 79 from Buckeye Lake through Heath and into Newark, then looping back down to Thornville taking State Route 13: all together a 30 minute trip. So, a few days after Christmas, I went sightseeing.

Buckeye Lake is a recreational man-made reservoir east of Columbus. The town is small and quiet, especially in the winter off-season. The lake is lined by little vinyl sided Cape Cod-style rental condos. Driving down the main drag, we passed a strip mall Mexican restaurant, jet ski rentals, a nautical themed dentist office, and the KOA campsite where I’m almost certain Cohen took the photos of herself smoking in a leather jacket in front of RV trailers — note how the similar beige wooden building behind the camper in her photo is to the KOA Buckeye Lake General Store. From the parking lot where Cohen photographed an Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church sign which read, “BLESSING OF THE ANIMALS”, we could see a tackle shop by the water and the industrial chic brewery across the street with carnival lights and Adirondack chairs. 

Our Lakeside Diner, also on Buckeye Lake’s stretch of OH-79, was featured a few times in the book. When the table next to us asked the waitress how her Christmas was, she sighed and launched into a story (about why she and her brother were fighting right now). When we received our food, our servings were so large that my husband asked to confirm his biscuits and gravy was indeed just a half order. She didn’t recognize the photobook when I showed it to her. 

Nine old men sat at the table pictured in Holy Ohio. The loudest of the crew wore a Trump 47 trucker hat and complained about teachers indoctrinating kids into communism and how all the new cellphone updates were Chinese and making his apps work wrong. Another guy at the table in an Airforce hat—there was an Air Force Base in Heath until 1996—pushed back a little by making fun of Linda McMahon, the current United States Secretary of Education. The group seemed to have fun talking about the sports cars the Trump hat guy had owned over the years and the different models he let them test dive. He told a rambling story about almost buying a Ferrari from a Mr. Marzetti, as he calls them, of “the salad dressing people.” Around here, we call any sort of Italian-ish meat and noodles dish “Johnny Marzetti.” It is hard to fault Cohen for her impulse to make fun of these people. It’s all a little on the nose. 

Farther up OH-79, the Starlite Motel is perched just within Heath city limits. The property manager came out to question us when he spotted me taking pictures in the parking lot. He didn’t recognize the book, and seemed almost disturbed to find an image of the motel sign printed in it, but eased up on me when I gave him my name and phone number with a local area code. 

Down the road was the Waterbeds ‘n’ Stuff, the photo of which, in Holy Ohio, does not, as was claimed in It’s Nice That’s write-up of the photobook, capture “rural consumer imagery.” I cannot fault the reviewer for coming away from Cohen’s image with that impression, given the way the sign is framed against a desolate gray sky. But Waterbeds ‘n’ Stuff is not some rural furniture outlet, as the photograph may imply. It is actually a well-recognized regional headshop chain. They first opened in 1972, when some hippies selling paraphernalia from their one-bedroom apartment bought a waterbed shop near the Ohio State University campus to upscale their semi-illicit dealings. The “‘n’ Stuff”—incense, porn and bongs—remain the main draw. Ohioans know that the name is tongue in cheek. Cohen does not appear to be in on the joke, a fact that plagues every page of Holy Ohio.

In Newark, we stopped for a beer at Bummie’s On Main, a dive Cohen featured heavily. From the parking lot, you can see a self service car wash, a Licking County Health Department run addiction counseling center, and rows of shotgun shacks. I wondered if these narrow wooden homes with their compact chainlink fenced yards were built for workers at the factory down the street, still visible from the lot. Once Simpson Soap Company, then Pharis Tire & Rubber, and then again the Westinghouse Electric Company, the building is now Newark Station, an “active arts, hospitality, and recreational community.” The complex hosts 18 loft apartments, an outdoor beach volleyball court, and the Earthworks Café & Lounge where you can order a $20 Asian Sesame Salmon salad and play trivia every Thursday night.

We also found the Family Dollar and Second Baptist Church that Cohen photographed. A middle aged woman rode a motorized wheelchair down the sidewalk. She had fuzzy pajama pants and box red hair in a messy bun and two little girls clinging to the scooter like it was a trolley car. I waited for them to pass before taking a picture.

Around the Baptist church were larger brick and wooden houses in various states of disrepair. Three porches had Halloween-themed Christmas decorations—life-size monstrous figures, a nylon tapestry of Jack Skellington, a plastic skeleton dressed as Santa sitting on their porch swing. I had to assume this was a coordinated effort, maybe a joke on the pious congregants who blocked their driveways when they parked on the street on Sundays.

Another clear contextual miss in the book is the image of Cohen, wearing a nun’s habit, posed before graffiti that reads “THIS IS THEFT.” According to Pew figures from 2023-24, 53% of adults in the Columbus metro area identify as Christians. Of those Christians, nearly 80% identified as Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, Historically Black Protestant, or Other Christian. Only 18.9% of the Columbus metro area Christians identified as Catholic. Compare this to 27.3% of Christians in the Cincinnati metro area and 35% of Christians in the Cleveland metro area. No one with a basic understanding of Ohio demographics would be surprised by these figures, Cincinnati and Cleveland are known as significantly Catholic, Euchre playing, fish frying cities while Columbus is broadly understood to be more of a prosperity gospel pyramid scheme at the megachurch featuring former OSU football coach kind of Protestant metro area.

So why then, in a photobook so concerned with religiosity in Central Ohio, does Cohen utilize Catholic imagery? When asked about the nun character in her interview with Dazed for the photobook’s rollout, Cohen responded, “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 […] there were just so many Biblical references that there was nothing else the book could have looked like other than a Bible.” The Catholic-Protestant divide in Ohio is a clear cultural distinction, but Cohen’s shallow overview of the topic evades that nuance.

When Cohen, also in her interview with Dazed, describes her cousin explaining “corn sweat” to her, she does so with an air of mysticism. In Cohen’s account, her cousin possesses primordial knowledge of a “biblical-like phenomenon that happens every year in the Midwest.” The cousin is bizarrely othered, like a Farmer’s Almanac come to life. If I was totally unfamiliar with the Midwest, I might be charmed by a folksy phrase like that. However, I understand that corn sweat was a totally faddy thing to say last summer. Cohen’s cousin might have grown up talking about the evapotranspiration of corn crops—the idea has been around for a while—or she might have seen the term trending on social media. The Nebraska State Climate Office at U of N published an article describing corn sweat as a “marketing term” that was “being used a lot right now” in July of 2025. ABC News, CBS News, AccuWeather, USA Today, The Weather Channel, The Washington Post, People, WOSU Public Radio, The Columbus Dispatch, and Scientific American all ran explainers on the phenomenon that same month. The concept of corn sweat was simply hot and topical. 

This noble-Volk view of Ohioans continues throughout the book, from the fiberglass dinosaurs and old people, to the condescending gawking of photos of a knife wielding child. Shots that don’t read as low hanging fruit feel like cheap punches. We found the giant dinosaur statues Cohen photographed just in Thornville at Legend Valley. Once a farm, it has been an outdoor music venue since the ’70s, hosting some big acts in its heyday. These days, there are mostly EDM and jam band festival weekends and, once, The Gathering of the Juggalos.

At the little Amish bulk food store where Cohen photographed a cashier and some cookies, the very old man in line in front of us tapped to pay. He turned to me as the Mennonite girl in a bonnet bagged his Buckeyes and Cowtails to gesture at the card reader and joke, “It is getting way too easy for me to buy candy!” 

My issue with Holy Ohio is not that Cohen took great pains to paint the region as any more remote or dated than is honest. It is genuinely very depressing here. There is deep poverty and industrial pollution everywhere. My issue with Cohen’s selective framing is that, for an artist so supposedly enamored by the kitsch and camp, she sands down the weirdness of this place in favor of tired shorthand. The EDM mural at Legend Valley was aesthetically interesting where the dinosaur statue is a cliche. The log cabin and lighthouse-shaped vacation rentals on Buckeye Lake were fun where the RV was trite. Was it too complex a task for her to wrestle with the headshops and elevated burgers and craft breweries and Apple Pay card readers and how those elements layer onto this chewed up and spit out corner of the Rust Belt? 

It is my opinion that Cohen was not exploring Heath, but molding it to fit her preconceived ideas of the Bible Belt. Many photos in Holy Ohio read like a scene from Gummo. That doesn’t appear to be the only visual reference Cohen seems to pull from, either. The jumbled interiors, bleak exteriors, and weathered faces in Cohen’s photos call to mind the costuming and production design in films like Bones and All, Silence of the Lambs, and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Additionally, a number of Cohen’s self-portraits very closely resemble photos of Ethel Cain. Of course, creating art about a place that doesn’t evoke other works from the same region is impossible, but I draw these comparisons with the knowledge that Cohen cites film as a big inspiration and starting point for many of her projects. Beyond that, I am not the first to note that Cohen has a history of egregious reference and mimicry. 

As a review of Cohen’s 2022 Deitch Gallery show, HELLO, My Name Is in LARB put it, “Her influences seem so obvious that she’s almost daring you to draw the comparisons.” Her photos for Perfect Mag’s September 2024 issue pay homage to images from Allen Jones’ Projects Book. Her photo of Kim Kardashian with fuzzy ice skates for Skims was a direct reproduction of a Lui Magazine 1966 cover. Her photo of Lana Del Rey for the same campaign recreated a 1960 cover of Esquire Magazine. Her portrait of Rihanna in a nun’s habit for Interview Mag recreated a vintage parody magazine cover entitled Pewboy. Perhaps most infamously, Cohen’s chameleonlike self portraiture for HELLO, My Name Is is so similar to the work of Cindy Sherman that nearly every positive review of the show made an acknowledgement of the inspiration source like a concession. 

Whether Cohen’s propensity to recreate rather than create makes her a hack is up for debate. But in Holy Ohio, she demonstrates neither insight into life in Ohio nor the desire to showcase any real thorniness. It remains unclear to me why she set out on this project at all. Does she aim to cast herself as an honorary member of fly-over country or highlight how incongruously her surgically achieved face and Hollywood toned body stick out in this setting? Are the photos of her uncle’s family intended to be uncomfortably voyeuristic or sentimental? I still can’t answer these questions and I doubt Cohen could either. Her inability to define her perspective and her sheer lack of curiosity to understand the complexity of her subject matter precludes this work from revealing anything about Ohio, let alone about Cohen herself.