Nadia Lee Cohen, Hello, My name is. 2021. S.l. IDEA, 2021. Clothbound hardcover. 30 x 23.5cm. 160 pages.
A fine copy. New, flawless, excellent. Except for the shrink wrap that was taken off for making photographs of the book. We also have a new, sealed, shrinkwrapped copy. If you are interested in that copy, please contact us at blicerobooks@outlookcom.
Nadia Lee Cohen’s “HELLO, My Name Is”: Identity and Transformation
In her second book, HELLO, My Name Is, British-born, Los Angeles–based photographer Nadia Lee Cohen explores the boundaries between self and fiction. Known for her cinematic visual language and fascination with Americana, Cohen transforms into 33 imagined characters inspired by discarded name tags found in thrift shops and flea markets.
A Portrait of Modern Mythmaking
At first glance, the portraits in HELLO, My Name Is may seem like self-portraits, but they are fictional lives fully inhabited. Each persona, from a fast-food worker to a suburban grandmother or department store clerk, is shaped through prosthetics, costume, and character study. Cohen performs them as if conjuring ghosts of forgotten pop culture, blending satire, sincerity, and cinematic excess.
The Art of Detail: Objects, Props, and the Language of Belongings
Every image in HELLO, My Name Is is accompanied by a still-life composition, basically a tableau of objects and possessions that build a psychological portrait. These collections (cigarettes, Jell-O boxes, Bibles, bleach, bacon, keys, and Polaroids) are simultaneously absurd and intimate. They form a taxonomy of middle-class aspiration and everyday despair, drawn from the overlooked debris of American life.
Between Fiction and Reality
Cohen’s world is immersive and self-reflexive. In the HELLO, My Name Is exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, these portraits were displayed alongside video vignettes and sculptural installations, including a conveyor belt carrying the characters’ belongings and hyperreal wax figures like the melted sunbather Carol. The effect was uncanny: visitors entered a parallel Los Angeles, a fever dream of motel rooms, fast-food nostalgia, and fading glamour, where Cohen herself seemed to dissolve into the characters she created.
Nadia Lee Cohen’s Los Angeles: A Mirror of the Surreal
Reflecting the city’s contradictions, its beauty, loneliness, and plastic melancholy pulse through Cohen’s lens. Her vision of L.A. is one of hyperreality: a place more cinematic than life, shimmering at the edges of satire. Critics have compared her work to Cindy Sherman, David Lynch, and David LaChapelle, but Cohen’s interpretation of California excess is uniquely her own, the aesthetic of an outsider who captures a truer version of the dream.
Beyond the Gallery: The World Expands into “BEST SELLER”
Cohen’s creative universe extends beyond photography. One of her fictional personas, June, a middle-aged would-be author, eventually became the “writer” of a real book titled BEST SELLER, a metafictional novel conceived by Cohen’s publisher IDEA and written by David Owen under the pseudonym June Newton. The book blurs art and life, echoing Cohen’s central obsession: the act of writing or photographing oneself into existence. It’s a playful yet profound extension of the HELLO, My Name Is world, proof that Cohen’s characters live beyond the frame.
A Mirror to the Collective Imagination
In HELLO, My Name Is, Cohen holds a mirror not to herself, but to the collective psyche of late 20th-century culture, its consumer dreams, suburban decay, and surreal humor. Her characters are exaggerated yet believable, grotesque yet tender. Each photograph asks us to reconsider where performance ends and truth begins.
Her Los Angeles may not be “real,” but it feels like the truest version of the myth: a landscape of eternal magic hour, plastic divinity, and unshakable melancholy.