JA Mortram’s photography is instilled in a unrelenting sense of isolation, suffering and social exclusion. In 2006, he started a blog called Small Town Inertia in which he documented the lives of people from Dereham, a small town in Norfolk. The photographs are uncompromising yet incredibly intimate. They seem to function as testaments to human suffering and its intersections with a deeply unequal system that due to its coldness propagates serious mental health issues. Mortram photography comes from a very personal place. He used it as a tool to tackle his own sense of marginalization and struggles with mental health. The exhibition Small Town Inertia is on show at Side Gallery, Newcastle from 12 January – 24 March .