Jim Mortram

Jim Mortram managed to make these powerful, haunting photos with little time, equipment or photo education. Mortram, 40, lives in East Anglia in Britain, has been taking photographs for five years and is self taught.

See more of his work here:

www.wix.com/jamortram/jamortram

We’ll let him tell the rest of his story:

“I work as a full time caregiver in my family’s home, taking care of my parents, and at the end of the week there is no budget for any photographic work. Most all of my equipment is borrowed and all of my shoots are completed in free time away from my duties at home.

For the last 18 months, together with people on or far beyond the outskirts of my local Market Towns community, I have been recording (through collaborative environmental portraiture, audio and video interviews and straight documentary shoots) life stories and memories, musings, hopes and struggles.

(We asked Mortram to define a Market Town: ‘A small town, small Market place, comparable to the lost towns way off in the middle of nowhere.’)

I do this with a passion and belief that the photographs we can make have a weight and longevity beyond our time here, have an ability to communicate a story long after the characters have departed. They are time capsules awaiting discovery.

These are moments of daily endurance that, in a generation, will have passed forever.

The Market Town series, I have come to learn, is not a project but a product. A product born from where and when I and the people I photograph are from. I know for as long as we’re here, I’ll continue to make this series, until the bonds of this small town’s inertia are breached. For any or all of us.

Tech Info: “Negatives developed at a local photo store and then re-photographed digitally with a home-made rig and reworked in photo-shop. Plans are afoot to have a darkroom at home, once the money is there so I can develop and hand print myself.

All shots were taken on a borrowed Nikon DSLR D200 ( f3.5 18 - 70mm) & Nikon FM2 (400 ASA f2.8 28mm) in natural light and spot metered.”