

East Atlanta can be gritty and dark, but it’s also blanketed by Southern heat, with streaks of sunlight peeking through the leaves of maple trees.

Beyond documenting its surface details, Desailly also harnesses light and color to distill what the trap feels like. It’s a site where constant artistic innovation is fueled by the hopes that life can be more than a never-ending hole of dematerializing dreams.īetween his Mamiya 7, Pentax 67, and Mamiya RZ67, Desailly photographed bags of marijuana slumped on the kitchen floor, money scattered on trap house tables and strip-club floors, men rapping in makeshift recording studios, and teens holding their guns. In this way, the trap is a paradox, providing a means for its inhabitants to escape itself. It provides an enclave for argument and agreement simply watching television or, not least of all, the creation of trap music, which derives its themes from all of the above. A trap house is typically where drugs are produced and sold, but it’s also a locus of community. “I wanted my music to inspire to get money and come up out of that.”ĭesailly spent two months in 2018 criss-crossing neighborhoods in the Georgia capital to photograph what life in the trap looks like. An excerpt from rapper Gucci Mane’s autobiography opens the book, likening the sound of trap to the gritty environment it arose from: “I couldn’t be rapping about shutting down the clubs because I wasn't in the clubs. His depiction of Georgia’s trap capital is warm, yet stark. He got the impression that someone really cares about their security.įor his first photo book, simply titled The Trap, the French photographer captured the Atlanta locales that birthed the ever-popular rap subgenre that shares the tome's name. The CCTVs cycled through images of dirt lawns and driveways infested with overgrown kudzu-and also the cars passing by, and who was in them. One was tuned to Netflix’s Narcos, while its counterpart, nearly double in size, displayed six far-reaching views of the surrounding southeast Atlanta neighborhood he was visiting. When Vincent Desailly walked into the living room, he noticed the two television screens on the wall.
