A woven straw mat, a man with outstretched arms spreading his wide boubou, or the white of the door of the photographer's 2CV: these are the makeshift stagings Oumar Ly composed on his travels through villages. He began with simple identity photographs; then the villagers of this region of northern Senegal, who were discovering photography in the early 1960s, invited him to make family pictures. The "mat" makes it possible to isolate what seems unmanageable in the frame: the insignificant, superfluous exterior. Instinctively, then, in the manner of certain Renaissance Madonnas, the photographer breaks the perspective, setting the main subject before a background stretched between landscape and lens. Modest accessories, a stool, a plastic bucket or the grain of a mud-brick wall, complete the picture of the family and of the whole village. One imagines several people behind the photographer, come to watch the spectacle of the photo session.