Episode 5 - Jim Mortram's future

Episode notes

I have been following Jim’s work for years on social media and I also have one of his small books published by the incredible Café Royal Books (https://www.caferoyalbooks.com). His project Small Town Inertia and his commitment to social documentary photography has been an inspiration. As I was thinking of potential guests for this show, Jim was at the top of that list and I am delighted that he said yes. To see more of his work visit: https://smalltowninertia.co.uk and you can also follow him on BlueSky at: https://bsky.app/profile/smalltowninertia.bsky.social.

Music: Blue Dot Sessions

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Pocket Casts | YouTube

AI Generated Transcript

[HOST] Hello. You're listening to another episode of Futures Possible. I am Bojan Fürst, and I make this show in St. John's, on the island of Newfoundland. Today's episode features somebody whose work I have been following for a long time. Jim's project, Small Town Inertia, is social documentary photography at its best. But Jim would not necessarily introduce himself as a photographer.

[JM] Yeah, I'm Jim Mortram. I'm principally a carer. Technically, in the UK, you'd call it an unpaid carer. So I don't work professionally. I work looking after a family member.

[HOST] My conversation with Jim was everything I was hoping it would be. We talked about what it means to be a carer, about mental illness, the toll caring takes on a person, photography, and AI. We talked about the casual cruelty of bureaucracy, wielding austerity as some perverse instrument of torture against the most vulnerable in our societies. And, of course, we talked about the future. So this is the future Jim imagined.

[JM] When I was a kid, because I live in a really rural spot, and back in the 80s, it felt even more remote, put it like that. There'd been no kind of migration in by anybody, forever. And it was always the joke that Norfolk was behind the rest of the UK. You know, it's like, if we want to go and see the future, we'll go down to London. That was time travel. Anyway, and I've ended up circumstantially without, because you don't know what's coming, staying all my life.

I was studying fine art painting at the nearest city to where we are, which is about, I guess, a 40-mile round trip away. And my mum, who had always been of poor health, got dramatically worse. And the stress of that and the stress of navigating the UK health benefit system gave my father a nervous breakdown. I think at that time that was his third. And I'm loath to say that I made the choice to return home, because it wasn't even a choice. It was, this is the situation, here's what I can do. So I left art school and returned home to be my mum's unpaid primary carer. And filled with the ego of youth, because I was in my early 20s then, I thought this will take six months and I'll get it sorted. And I would turn to my studies, you know, I'll take a leave of absence. The door was left open to me to return.

What ended up happening was I kind of got unknowingly, I kind of did a PhD in empathy. Because what you think a carer's role is, it isn't. It's not about you imposing what you think should be done to fix a situation. It's really all about listening to the person that you're looking after and doing exactly what they wish. And making sure that they have everything they need and, you know, my work in inverted commas could be anything from, you know, life-saving first aid. My mother's got chronic epilepsy, amongst other things, and she's had it for, you know, 75 years now. And at the time I returned home, she was having 40 grand mal seizures a day. And every time she'd swallow her tongue and she'd need someone to physically make sure that that wasn't a choking threat. So my hours were kind of 24 and my days were seven days. And this was constant.

Time when you're a carer alters, mostly because you live the same day on repeat.

Yeah, 15 years go past. And all of a sudden, I have this little voice saying, What happens to, weren't you going to be a painter? Weren't you going to, what's happening? Because, you know, sadly, the situation that I'm actually caring within is one that's never going to get better. It's always going to, it's a slow deterioration.

So, yeah, I was in a really bad way. I was, like, self-medicating with alcohol. I didn't know it at the time, but I had PTSD. I had, you know, like, heightened anxiety. I think I'd always had heightened anxiety, to be fair.

And it got to a point that was so,

so bad that I hadn't really spoken to anyone for a year. And it was, oh, it was kind of depressing.

And in the midst of this, I had a visit from a friend that I hadn't seen for, God, almost a decade. By chance, they had a camera with them. And they could see how bad I was. And they said, Look, you used to like art and stuff. Let me loan you this camera. You need to get out. Just go out into the village and, you know, see if it does something for you. And I did. I started photographing an elderly gentleman that lived two doors down from me, because he was the only person at that time that would be awake at three o'clock, four o'clock in the morning when I would go for a walk after my evening shift. And we'd both put our hand up and say hi to each other. Never spoke, but we knew we existed. And he, a bit like me, hadn't spoken to anybody for a long time, poured out his life story to me. I made photographs with him to kind of learn how to use a camera with him, made these photographs. He loved them. But then he had a medical procedure and caught an infection and died. I kind of felt that he had left me with this blueprint of how to kind of keep him alive through these photographs and through the memories of these amazing conversations we'd had. He was still here. And if it wasn't for that, he wouldn't exist. There'd be no trace. You know, that kind of corresponded with certain political things that happened. Welfare cuts and, you know, myself being marginalized. I had a community. I found a community that was also marginalized. And through this one kind of doorway that had opened by chance, yeah, it set me in the direction that would later become me devoting the last 15 years of my life to long form documentary.

When I started, I came to this knowing no one because I really hadn't been out of the family property for 15 years. The only time that I would, I would go to the supermarket to get provisions or I'd go to the

pharmacy to get medicine or the post office. You know, the post office. I didn't know anybody. So it began with me just talking to people. You know, I began carrying the camera with me everywhere. It was like my talisman or something. And the thing is, because I'd had this kind of ego death. So when I came to become involved with the tool that a camera is, it wasn't, you know, I just followed its instructions. A camera's got a lens that pointed away from me, not to me. So it wasn't about me projecting myself. It wasn't about things that I really had to say. It was purely, purely using the tool as designed. It was all about how do I document, preserve and amplify. You're either a sponge or a stone. So you either

have it like really affect you or you just, you're just blind to it. You know, it bounces off you. And for me, it's always been that because I'm there as a person, primarily, I always take it with me.

The way that I make documentary or the way that I realize it is really by being there as me. The people that I work with, they're really like friends. But they weren't when we met. I met everybody in this project as a complete stranger. You know, I would meet them at the bus stop or I'd meet them at the pharmacy. And slowly, little by little by little, these relationships, like any relationship, any relationship that's going to grow and build is always rooted in trust. You can't, a camera doesn't buy you that. The only thing that really gets you that is time. So it's ended up that everybody that I photograph, because I keep in touch with everybody, they've become like my extended family. This is our collective, communal

statement, I guess. And we do it together.

Terrifying. On a personal level, it's pretty terrifying. Because, you know, I'm not a gambling man, but I'd probably get good odds and both of my parents not make in the next five years. Which will obviously have an emotional price. But it's also going to leave a lot of situations that I have to suddenly deal with. You know, in a really weird way, I feel like I've got some sort of arrested development, because I've been, I've lived in this enclosed system for so long. And then suddenly, I'm going to be putting, everything's going to be my responsibility. I mean, it kind of is now, but it's going to be a lot of stuff to sort out.

And it's going to be very strange for me, personally, to suddenly be in a situation where I can, you know, reintegrate myself into a very different life. Life is going to be very different. I mean, obviously, I hope that doesn't happen anytime soon. But you have to start thinking practically about the future. And that's actually quite jarring, because, you know, for the last 20 years, the next hour is about as far as I can think. So the next five years,

really, it's about learning to ride the waves, and riding the highs as well as the lows, you know, so you don't get too excited when something is a high, and you don't get too down when something is a low. Because I know that there's going to be highs and lows, there's going to be highs and lows personally, and there's going to be highs and lows, you know, globally. We're watching it happen right now. So for me, the next five years is, I guess, baby steps. It's just another step into that future that's hurtling towards me, that's unavoidable. And how best can I

conduct myself with the situations that are personal, but also, how best can I conduct myself when interacting with other people about the future that's becoming the present? Because, you know, the past, it took me a long time in life to realize that the only place the past really exists is within us.

Well, the thing about the UK future, um, is it kind of loops back into why I love, love photography. Photography isn't

singularly about pausing a moment. It's about preserving a moment. And I always view, like, photographs as like messages in a bottle that you throw into the river of time, and it just bobs along, and then hopefully somebody will find it and look at it. And my God, they're instantly transported back to, you know, 1910, 1920. They see these pictures, and they resonate, they impact, they carry empathy and information. If only human beings could live to 150, that might give them enough time to realize that they should pay attention to history. To live in a time now where we've kind of had 25 years of making the population of this country as stupid as possible. It's really, it's an emotional

grooming. So the next five years what I see is,

I mean, look, it depends on what side of the bed I get out on. If I wake up on the good side of the beds, I'm like, people are going to wake up and they're going to see that, you know, maybe they've got something more in common with, with the people that they've been groomed to scapegoat and blame. Than the politicians that are making the decisions that result in these ridiculous, horrific situations. And they'll team up and they'll say, right, together we can, now we've got a common cause. We, the people, have a common cause. We can hold the power accountable. So if I get out on the right side of the bed, I'm like, yeah, people are going to, the humanity is going to win out. And then I, you know, it's a rare occasion I get out of that side of the bed because normally when I get out of bed, I'm like, oh, we're just going to make the same mistakes because we don't have 150 year lifespan. So we forget and nobody pays attention to what happened, what's happened before. It's almost like watching, you know, we live in an age where almost every single movie has been remade.

And I'm like, I think to myself, are we doing the same thing with history? Did no one see all of the things that led to World War I, World War II? Are we remaking that? Is our memory so short? And the thing that I find really mystifying about the human being is even if we have

very visible red flags about what could happen, blindly, we seem to run towards it. I mean, there's a couple of things that are undoubtedly coming, and that's AI, robotics.

What's going to happen? I mean, I think that's going to happen way quicker than people perceive. And then what happens? There's going to be a huge choice, isn't there? It's either going to be a universal basic income and a huge, dramatic change in how we structure our lives and what we do with our existence, because it's no longer going to be

work until you're 70 and, you know, get a watch and drop dead. It's going to be something very different. And I think it's just each day as it comes. It has to be. It has to be. It's two things, really, two really simple things. It's I like to treat people in the same way that I like to be treated. That's the most simple. I'm not a religious guy, but that's a pretty good rule to live by, you know. But also I like to I kind of like to practice what I preach. I'm a firm believer that the spine, the core, the soul of the problem in the UK is that for and it's a generational thing people haven't been listened to. Right. And it's kind of easy to say I'm just going to stiff arm everybody and push them away. So I guess, yeah, the next five years I'm going to I'm going to continue looking after and loving my family as best I can. I'll continue making the work that I make with my community because it's like I'll stop when the situation stops. Will that situation stop in my lifetime, in our lifetime? It's highly unlikely. So I'll be doing this until my last breath.

But I'm also going to very actively try and build bridges rather than build walls.

I guess I'm just going to continue in every facet of my life to bear witness and I'm going to do so with love and humour as much as I can. Because I think sometimes if you don't laugh, you cry.

You know, it comes back to this thing of time and certainly the time that you get used to as a carer because, you know, you don't get to make plans. So, I mean, if I make a plan for later this week, something could happen at home and I have to cancel. So, the idea of having the luxury of planning is, you know, as far away from me as the concept of being debt free. It's a hallucination. It's a fever dream. So, you've just psychologically, you've just got to prepare yourself for what comes.

I would almost certainly say, whatever happens, whatever's happening, love wins. You know, we do live on a utopia. You know, why is it some people are born to... Isn't that that William Blake poem? Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless night. It doesn't have to be like that. You know, in the face of the seemingly unavoidable future, remember that love's the important thing. Because I think that that's going to be a hard thing for people to grasp when there's such a proliferation of hate. And the only antidote to that is love.

[HOST] Thank you for listening. That was Jim Mortram, documentary photographer based in Norfolk, England. I am Bojan Fürst and you listened to Futures Possible. I talk with my guests about their futures and a way of being they can imagine for themselves in this time of uncertainty. You can find Futures Possible wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you want to leave a comment or support the show, visit futurespossible.com. And if you liked the show, please, share it with your friends and family. Take care.