JA Mortram’s harsh, bleak portrait of life on the UK’s fringes

JA Mortram is stressed when he answers the phone on a Thursday afternoon. The local GP surgery in his town of Dereham in Norfolk, England, where his mother who has chronic epilepsy is registered, has stopped delivering medication to patients’ homes. The last remains of her supplies had run out two days ago, and he and his partner were scrambling to try and obtain some.

“My girlfriend’s just gone and waited an hour and a half to get the scripts, and then had to take another bus to get to Tesco, and she’s been told that they don’t have it all. Now she’s got to wait three hours for the next bus, because they aren’t working,” he says. ​“So she’s amazing, but what are you supposed to do?”

The new change turned what should have been a routine task – acquiring medicine – into a long and ultimately unsuccessful day. But having dropped out of art school during the ​’90s to become his mother’s primary carer, which he has been ever since, the news was just another setback in a years-long battle, as public services have continued to ail and wealth inequality has widened.

• Read next: What it’s like to live on the fringes of British society

“There’s no war on poverty. There’s a war on people in poverty – it never changes,” he says. ​“Honestly, I could get someone here quicker with a wrap of heroin than legal drugs, though that’s not my scene at all. What kind of system do we have?”

After being lent a camera in 2006, Mortram began taking photographs of an elderly neighbour, who was chronically ill and passed away a couple of months later. ​“I was about 15 years [into caring for my mother full time], really depressed and cut off from everyone,” he recalls. ​“He left me with a blueprint of what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, which is amplify stories and document people that are marginalised, because I am too. I wanted to amplify all these people, because everyone’s got a voice – it’s just no one’s fucking listening.”

Since then, for nearly two decades, he has been focusing his lens on people in his local community facing similar tough circumstances, as the 2008 financial crisis, Conservative austerity measures, the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing the cost of living crisis, and much more have all come and pinched hard at the working classes and the welfare net.

• Read next: Documenting the everyday faces of austerity Britain

He began posting photographs in his blog Small Town Inertia, which developed into his highly lauded photobook of the same name in 2016. Now, Mortram is set to publish the second volume, Small Town Inertia 2, nine years later. Featuring forewords from Stephen Fry and Jason Williamson of post-punk band Sleaford Mods, the book expands on his archive of work in his distinctive, stark, black-and-white visual style.

With interviews of Mortram’s sitters featuring alongside photographs, Small Town Inertia 2 gives them pages of space to be able to tell their stories, in a world where such room to do so is rare to non-existent. Included in the book are the likes of Jack, who has struggled with addiction and mental illness, or Kirsty, who had her newborn son taken away from her by social services, making her ​‘basically his cow”.

And there’s James, pictured on his sofa, who has grown up with cerebral palsy after being born three months premature. He explains the difficulty of growing up in a wheelchair, and the unavoidable reality of being stared at and othered. It’s a sometimes harrowing, yet always powerful look at life for people on the margins of British society. 

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Yet despite photographs focusing in on others, in many ways, it’s also Mortram’s most personal work yet. Small Town Inertia 2 opens with an account of dealing with the Department for Work and Pensions, and the hoops he and his disabled mother had to jump through to access basic welfare. ​“Before COVID, when I was about three years into Small Town Inertia 2, the Conservatives brought in a policy for those receiving Disability Living Allowance, where you essentially had to prove that you’re ill, and then you will get PIP – Personal Independence Payment,” he explains. 

“We had a nurse visit – my mum had a seizure in the first three minutes, and the visiting assessor burst into tears,” he continues. She didn’t even know what an epileptic seizure was, freaked out and ran out of the house saying: ​‘I shouldn’t be here. Two weeks later, we get a letter saying that your mum is fit for work, and it took me eight months to overturn it.”

There’s echoes of their experiences dotted throughout Small Town Inertia 2. James details his own PIP struggles, who despite clearly living with cerebral palsy, had to be assessed on multiple occasions and made to undertake humiliating tasks, including folding a piece of paper to prove that he couldn’t use his arms. Another person named Ed, meanwhile, talks about the difficulties of being a carer for his child and its endless nature – ​“children are always hungry” – featuring shades of Mortram’s own life.

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And it makes sense that there are parallels. Unlike many photographers, who parachute into a world to make their work, Mortram is an active participant in the subject and community that he captures. Within that, he can see their resilience. ​“With everybody in the book, if they are younger than me, they’d become like my little brother. If they’re older than me, they’re like the uncle that I never had,” he explains. ​“My god, if people had to go through half, a tenth, a hundredth of what these people have had to, whether it’s complications from age, mental health, addiction or medical issues, on top the hate, stigma and stress… every photograph breaks my heart.”

“When I picked up a camera, I instantly knew what I wanted to do, which was [ask]: ​‘How best can I serve my community?” he continues. ​“Well, by preserving and amplifying their testimony. Because if I we don’t, no one else is going to give a fuck. And that’s why photography is important.”

Small Town Inertia 2 by JA Mortram is set to be published by Image & Reality. Pre-order a copy here.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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