The aim of this article is, first of all, to offer some keys to the hermeneutics of the documentary image in its various manifestations, and then to defend a contemporary documentary image that is aesthetically autonomous and contributes to a phenomenon that in the last three decades has been called «non-fiction cinema», «creative documentary» or «cinema of the real». All this will help us to trace a journey through the implication of the ethical question in this and other phenomenological paradigms of the documentary image.