The article deals with a specific shift in evolution of documentary which takes place after 1960s as an opposition to conventional nonfiction film totally embedded within the politics of representation. This shift refers to a change in the understanding (both in film theory and film practice) of how sound, image, meaning, affect and truth are related to each other within an unstable situation of cinematographic representation. As stated in the article, this shift can be also described through the notion of imagination understood as "embodiment in image" and at the same time as the process of "stable imagery deformation", as Gaston Bachelard put it. Such an approach allows us to see the image within a documentary not only as a visual index inevitably connected with the idea of photographic objectivity, but as a complex entity existing in a space between a film and a spectator and formed within spectator's experience. The article is based on the concepts by Bill Nichols, Michael Renov and Vivian Sobchack, as well as on the philosophy of imagination by Gaston Bachelard; key ideas are illustrated with the examples from the films by Minh-ha Trinh and Errol Morris.