Jim Mortram is an entirely self-taught photographer and full-time carer for his parents who has spent the last three years following the lives and telling the stories of several people ‘stuck in a maddeningly unbalanced position’ and living within a three mile radius of Dereham, the East Anglian market town that’s his home. Work from Jim’s earlier Market Town series, which included audio interviews with the people Jim has photographed, was previously screened at Bank Street Arts as part of PushPull and we’re delighted to announce that this is now being followed with a three week print exhibition of his Small Town Inertia project.
As Jim notes, ‘These images depict the full stop of Welfare State cuts, housing benefit cuts, loopholes and failures of systems and what happens when the heart of a community is slowly eroded. These images also depict the lives of those hanging on, bowed yet not broken, of lives where a fight to survive is very real. Fighting apathy, addiction, fighting loneliness and illness, all the while clinging to self respect, adrift in the community, in life, but not yet lost.’
Small Town Inertia opens on Tuesday 15th January and coincides with Jim being included in the British Journal of Photography’s ‘ones to watch for 2013’. Jim is also one of the participants in The Motorway Service Station as a Destination in its Own Right, a photographic response to our patron Simon Armitage’s volume of poems of the same name.
