General Entry - Emerging Talent Awards

Young girls who attend a Purity Ball make a vow to remain sexually abstinent until marriage, “to remain pure and live pure lives before marriage”. Their fathers sign a document in which they promise to protect their daughters in their choices. Many of them exchange rings as a symbol of their vows. When I first heard about the Purity Balls I imagined angry American fathers in panic, terrified of anything that might hurt their daughters or their honor. But as I learnt more, I understood that the fathers, like all parents, simply wanted to protect the ones that they love – in the best way they know how. It was also often the girls themselves that had taken the initiative to attend the balls. They had made their decisions out of their own conviction and faith, in many cases with fathers who didn’t know what a Purity Ball was before being invited by their daughters. The more I learnt, the more I was surprised that I had been so quick to judge people I knew so little about. I was struck by the idea that what set us apart wasn’t anything more than how we had been influenced by the culture we grew up in and the values it had instilled in us. In Purity I wanted to create portraits so beautiful that the girls and their fathers could be proud of the pictures in the same way they are proud of their decisions – while someone from a different background might see an entirely different story in the very same photographs. For me, Purity is about how we are shaped by the society in which we grow up and how we interpret the world through the values we incorporate as our own. I believe that our view of the world around us is shaped by where we come from, where we have been, and who we believe ourselves to be – and that one of our biggest challenges is to try to understand that which seems most strange to us. The book Purity was published by Bokförlaget Max Ström in March 2014 during the exhibition at Fotografiska, The Swedish Museum of Photography, in Stockholm.