This image is taken from Dutch documentary photographer Bebe Blanco Agterberg's project A Mal Tiempo, Buena Cara (In Bad Weather, A Good Face). Bebe's work focuses on blending art with documentary photography in a way designed to question our idea of truth. "I like to play with presenting work in a very classical way, while asking the viewer to question whether what they see is real or not," she says. Taken on a Canon EOS 5D Mark III (now succeeded by the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV) with a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM lens at 1/125 sec, f/3.5 and ISO640. © Bebe Blanco Agterberg
When documentary photographer Bebe Blanco Agterberg was 12, her mother, who was born in Spain during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco but was later adopted and raised in the Netherlands, appeared on a Dutch TV show that helps reunite people with their biological families. Bebe's mother had never been able to discuss her past, simply because, until she was reunited with her relatives, she had never known what had happened to her – or why.
Bebe was clearly deeply affected by her mother's experience. The absence that we try to fill with information and the process of reconstruction would later become a recurring theme in Bebe's work, perhaps most prominently in A Mal Tiempo, Buena Cara (In Bad Weather, A Good Face). The documentary project, shot in black and white, reflected on the transition period in Spain following Franco's death in 1975 and explored how "forgetting" was used as a political tool during the country's shift to democracy.