- Venue
- Workers Gallery
- Starts
- Thursday, June 20, 2019
- Ends
- Saturday, July 27, 2019
- Address
- 99 Ynyshir Road, Ynyshir, RCT, Wales, CF39 0EN
- Location
- Wales
- Organiser
- Workers Gallery
‘About seven or eight years ago, in the months before I started the Small Town Inertia blog. It both saved and completely transformed my life.
After years of being a carer for my disabled mother, I’d become highly marginalised. Being a carer is the best thing I’ve done with my life, but it did not come without a heavy price. Years of isolation, witnessing days and nights of terrible physical and mental pain, it does affect you. I became withdrawn, anxious, had terrible panic attacks, self-medicated, self-harmed, struggled and struggled – until it reached a peak where I just shut down, for almost a year I didn’t say a word out loud. When I first held a camera, it really re-connected me with myself, a moment of clarity.
I knew little to nothing about photography or the history of photography, then about three years into it I found a book at a yard sale that included Eugene Richards’ work. It was so incredible, his work is so powerful, so drenched in reality and empathy. For the first time I had knew and understood that there were others making work with a social conscience’
“I’d look at mainstream media and see no reflection of the realities I see portrayed within it,” says JA Mortram (From British Journal of Photography https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/01/qa-j-a-mortram-on-his-ten-year-project-small-town-inertia/)
