HELLO MY NAME IS - Nadia Lee Cohen

This photobook by Nadia Lee Cohen, published in 2021 by IDEA, is part of the Darwin archive because it treats selfhood as both archive and invention. In HELLO MY NAME IS, Cohen uses thirty-three real name badges sourced from flea markets to construct an ensemble of fictional personas — each one photographed as a fully embodied character, then echoed through a still-life and a short biographical text. The result is a surreal procession of American archetypes and misfits: surreal, tragicomic, often grotesque. Housewives, weirdos, washed-up stars, and mallrats populate the pages, each sculpted in obsessive detail through prosthetics, styling and Cohen’s own presence. Visually hyperreal and conceptually controlled, the book reworks the tropes of commercial fashion, cinematic typecasting, and suburban melancholy into something stranger and more intimate. A study in artificiality and the politics of display, it belongs here for the way it stretches photography into theatrical space — and persona into prop, text, and myth.

Technical Sheet
Title: HELLO MY NAME IS
Artist / Author: Nadia Lee Cohen
Date: 2021
Technique / Printing Method: Offset printed photobook
Medium / Materials: Clothbound hardcover with debossed label motif
Dimensions (cm): 30 × 23.5
Language: English
Pages: 160
Publisher / Editor: IDEA
Condition: New