With over 500 striking portraits, Children of Nepal documents the resilience of youngsters in the aftermath of an earthquake

In April 2015, a devastating earthquake hit Nepal, killing nearly 9,000 people and injuring a further 22,000. Amassing 10 billion USD worth of damage, the tragedy meant that a lot of the country’s children had to grow up much faster than expected. On the other side of the world, the self-taught photographer Sean Alexander Geraghty was in London working as a freelance fashion photographer, while trying to get some personal projects in wherever he could.

Starting out his life in Nice, the photographer moved to the UK capital at the tender age of 22, starting out assisting fashion photographers before establishing his own practice. As a child, he would go on business trips with his mother who was an interior design journalist. He would help out the photographers, and over time, the medium slowly grew on him. “My generation is the one with digital cameras, so it was cheap to mess around with the medium,” he tells It’s Nice That of his career beginnings.

But now, with a hefty dose of experience on his side, the camera has become a tool for communication; an excuse to travel and meet new people and new cultures. His works have graced the likes of Paper Journal, Vogue Italia, not to mention the British Journal of Photography, and last year, we followed his lens over to Cuba, where he beautifully portrayed the country’s diminishing Chinese population in the series Barrio Chino, Habana.

The story of his recently released shoot however, begins in Nepal. Initially, the photographer journeyed to there to teach kids boxing through a charity. But as it so happens with photographers, soon, he got the itch to start taking pictures. He became interesting in documenting the local children, fascinated by the different communities that made up the Nepalese landscape. The year was 2016, a year after the earthquake, and the country was still deep in the midst of its recovery.

Alongside teaching kids boxing, he went onto get in touch with schools, NGOs, orphanages and local figures to make a series all about the kids. “The earthquake had a really big impact on the life of the kids,” he explains, “I just wanted to put the spotlight on them.” Within just a few weeks, he had captured the portraits of over 500 children against the natural setting of a white backdrop and either wooden, concrete, or white sheeted flooring. The children take a variety of poses, some standing, others sitting, some scratching an itch.

Egalitarian in composition, giving each child equal measures of gravitas, the striking series is poignant in its sole focus of the children. Sean constructed a mobile daylight studio to ensure this, compiling together some white curtains, a wooden pole and some clamps and rope to built the makeshift space. It’s a wonderful series in its vastness and its personality, capturing the character of each and every child as they cheekily look away for an instant, or gaze interestingly straight down the lens. “Every group within the story was it’s own shoot,” adds Sean. “I had to get in touch with the headmasters of the schools, the directors of the charities and so on, and a lot of time was spent on admin, trying to convince people to let me take the portraits.”

As some people said no, which was often frustrating, at other times, Sean was confronted with a great surprise as some schools connected him with others who wanted to take part in the project. “My background is in fashion photography, so this research phase was all very new to me.” But with an eager determinism, and his mobile studio in tow, Sean would set up wherever possible – in the streets, at a venue – wherever the light was best and take the portraits. “I had to be very quick since it was already very ‘invasive’,” he continues, “we’ve all been kids once, and hopefully some of us have great memories from childhood. I hope the viewer can see how childhood is different depending on where you grow up, and show the resilience these kids have under different circumstances.”