“In “Purity” I photographed and interviewed young girls and their fathers who had participated in Christian Purity Ball ceremonies in the United States, where the girls promise to stay abstinent from sex until marriage while their fathers pledge to protect them in their choices.

Coming from one of the most secular countries in the world, I wanted to try to understand this phenomenon that was very strange to me with my background. To pass on this challenge to the viewers of my work and to explore how our own experiences affect our reactions to what we encounter, I wanted to create portraits so beautiful that the girls and their fathers could be proud of the pictures in the same way as they are proud of their decisions – while someone from a different background might see an entirely different story in the very same photographs”.