Nadia Lee Cohen — A journey to Ohio to visit the photographer's family

“Ohio was my first introduction to anything overtly American outside of watching TV. 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.

We went to visit them in 1999. I have fragmented, warm memories of fireflies, maple trees, instant friendships with cousins, and my uncle’s house crammed with ornaments and heaps of stuff we were never told off for playing with. I don’t remember it ever being quiet: my parents and my uncle’s family would sit around the kitchen table talking about whatever; and as you walked through the house, the noise from one television would fade and reach a crescendo as you approached a new room. Cartoons in the basement blended into a police chase in the kitchen and then merged with bad news in the front room.

I remember the smell of bacon, coffee, or pizza depending on the time of day. Kids would be running around squealing. The house was very much alive—there was a coziness to the chaos, and I was at the age where I found any kind of dispute or dysfunctionality exciting. Coming from the quiet countryside farm where I grew up, the palette of brown, green and beige was replaced with the bright, primary American colors of food, packaging and signage.

I equate that initial experience of America to what it’s like to see Disneyland for the first time as a child—the magic, the excitement, the innocence. Then, if you’re ever unlucky enough to end up there as an adult, you see the people under the costumes, the chipping paint, the junk food and the overly enthusiastic clientele. (I think the only way I’d ever go there again is under the influence of mushrooms, as per Pee-wee Herman’s advice.)

After the 1999 trip, I didn’t think we’d ever go back to Ohio—not for any particular reason other than it just hadn’t occurred to any of us, and life got in the way. One afternoon in 2025, my uncle called my mum on the landline to tell her, “I’m dying, goodbye.” This matter-of-fact dramatic declaration is okay to find funny if you know my uncle, and not necessarily something to take entirely seriously, as he’d said it before. But I watched my mum after that particular phone call, and I knew this time she realized she might actually never see her brother again. That phone call was the catalyst to go back.

Obviously, I wasn’t taking pictures in 1999, but my dad took a lot of VHS footage, so my memories of that trip were documented and validated by the grainy tapes. I always knew what an effect it had on me from looking back at them. The idea of going back 26 years later to document my mum’s reunion with her brother just felt important. It’s probably my most personal project to date in terms of its candidness and lack of staging.

I had a fear that when we returned, they might have renovated the house into something IKEA-esque and drastically different—or that everyone would be walking around wearing horrible workout gear. But it was the opposite. It felt like time had stopped between 1999 and now walking into that house in Heath. The same green carpet, wooden kitchen, paintings, antiques, ephemera and plants that hadn’t aged a day—a kind of vortex where everything would remain the same forever. And if I returned in another 25 years, I imagine it would still be the same.

In my own life, everything has changed, and I’m really far away now from where I grew up and the house I grew up in. In Ohio, it’s hard to explain—there is so much to talk about, and it’s nearly impossible to describe unless I sit with you and go through the book page by page. There is evidence of ill health, and so many guns and so much ammunition everywhere you look. But somehow, it felt like no one would ever die in Ohio—because time stops there.”