In 2011, Malagasy photographer Emmanuelle Andrianjafy arrived in Dakar, a port city on Senegal’s Atlantic coast. Nothing’s in Vain, published by MACK in 2017, gathers her response to the experience of being uprooted into a capital at once vibrant and disorientating. Rather than treating Dakar as a stable subject to be surveyed, Andrianjafy photographs the city as a place encountered in motion, through uncertainty, attraction, and adjustment.

The book’s sequence moves sharply between street scenes, portraits, landscapes, and close-up details. This alternation gives the work its distinctive tension: the city appears not as a single coherent image but as a shifting accumulation of impressions, where construction and deconstruction coexist. The changing scale and subject matter echo the photographer’s fluctuating experience of a metropolis in constant flux, while the embrace of disorder becomes an active method rather than a problem to be resolved.

For collectors, the importance of Nothing’s in Vain lies in this meeting of personal displacement and urban observation. It is a first book that resists explanatory distance, allowing Dakar to emerge through fragments, encounters, and visual reversals. The 112-page hardback contains 59 colour plates and 18 duotones, a varied photographic register reflected in the book’s movement between atmosphere, human presence, and material detail. As the winner of the 2017 MACK First Book Award, it occupies a clear place in the publisher’s record of contemporary photobook publishing while remaining committed to the unsettled, intimate character of Andrianjafy’s encounter with the city.