An encounter with ethics and documentary images in the exhibition ‘Totes les cartes’/‘Todas las cartas’/‘All the Letters’

This article analyses the video letters that were exhibited in the exhibition ‘Totes les cartes’/‘Todas las cartas’/‘All the Letters’ at the CCCB in Barcelona and inter- rogates their formal properties in relation to moving images displayed in the gallery. It analyses the representation of the documentary subjects and their relationship to the film-makers that depict them – Isaki Lacuesta and Naomi Kawase, Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerín, So Yong Kim and Fernando Eimbcke – highlighting issues of corporeality, proximity, memory and mortality and in particular how these tropes might be altered by our experience of viewing these images in the gallery. The notion of the moving image as a form of correspondence raises questions of the ethics of documentary form in the gallery and the intimacy of these individual pieces develops this notion of our embodied presence and our relationship with and responsibility to these images and the subjects of them.