Theatre photography (actor photography and stage photography) is always exposed to the traps of a double lie: a lie of the theatre itself, as a game with reality, and a lie of the staged photograph as an artificial construction of the same reality. Unlike the supposed “noème de la photographie” that Barthes refers to in the “ça a été”, of which the medium would be the almost magical guarantor, theatre photography is, therefore, part of a series of “ça n’a jamais été” (it-has-never-been-there): the actor is not the character, who does not exist anyway, and his photography only captures a second degree artifice, to which it adds its own level of fictional elaboration, increased by its technical constraints. Thanks to this game between artifice and the real, theatre photography, at least in the first fifty years of its massive diffusion, undoubtedly allows a real remediation of theatre through photography, of which we will try to sketch some modalities and stakes, from Meyerhold to Brecht, passing by Antonin Artaud.