Jim A. Mortram on Small Town Inertia (Bonus)

The New Exchange with Ken Grand-Pierre

By now you’ve probably clocked the tagline of this podcast that reads “a podcast about music” with music scratched off and the word “people” above it. That tagline is as literal as possible to depict what drives this podcast and what intrigues me the most: the lives of people and what we can learn from them. I’d be hard-pressed to think of an episode that better focuses on that tagline than today’s bonus episode with award-winning photographer Jim A. Mortram, the creator of Small Town Inertia. There are so many multitudes to describing this photo project, but at an attempt at putting it simply: Jim is a carer in his family home, and it’s through this chain of events that he found himself back in his hometown; a place he initially wanted to escape from.

But what happened next, is really something else, where Jim found himself reaching out to various people in town, documenting their lives and doing so in a way that many weren’t. What makes this specifically different, is that Jim’s hometown is one of the many small towns in the UK largely ignored by the wider public, leaving the town destitute, and as a result, isolated and practically forgotten. It’s through Jim’s camera that we learn about these people, their lives, and the overt marginalization they’ve been relegated to throughout the years. Throughout our talk we delve into the who, what, when, where, and why of Small Town Inertia (and yes, we do also chat about the “how” as well).