Abstract This essay examines David Magnusson’s 2014 photographic volume Purity featuring portraits of fathers and daughters who attend “purity balls,” ceremonial dances that celebrate young women’s decision to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Staged outdoors near the subjects’ homes, most portraits feature fathers in black ties and daughters in ball gowns against a distant backdrop of sublime natural landscapes. We argue that the project’s arrangement of narratives and frontier aesthetics invites audiences to attend to the mythic relationship between conquering frontiers and subjugating women’s bodies. Purity represents a subversive deployment of metonymy and enthymeme to infer spectator complicity in the associative connections between frontier mythology and purity culture.

中文翻译：

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处女地：大卫·马格努森纯洁中的性别、自然和边境神话

摘要 本文考察了大卫·马格努森 (David Magnusson) 2014 年出版的《纯洁》(Purity) 摄影集，其中展示了参加“纯洁舞会”的父亲和女儿的肖像，这是一种庆祝年轻女性决定在结婚前保持性禁欲的仪式舞蹈。大多数肖像都在拍摄对象家附近的户外上演，描绘了在远处壮丽的自然景观的背景下，父亲系黑色领带，女儿系舞会礼服。我们认为，该项目的叙事安排和边境美学邀请观众关注征服边境和征服女性身体之间的神话关系。纯洁代表了转喻和韵母的颠覆性部署，以推断旁观者在前沿神话和纯洁文化之间的关联联系中的共谋。