Simon Sharp BAD COMPANY

Photography is inherently communicative, and Simon Sharp became a photographer to convey the ideas he had learned while studying science, technology and international development at the University of Edinburgh in the most democratic way possible. “People can understand a lot more about the world through photography than they can through a high-class essay,” he says.

Although he always thought being a photographer was a job for someone else, in 2014, he began traveling to locations where he felt there were stories to be told. He began his series “Bad Company,” which depicts child brick laborers working in factories in Nepal and India, in 2015. Self-funding the project, he spent five months in the Kathmandu Valley, where he estimates that there are at least 765 brick factories, and tens of thousands of indentured child laborers.

Without the trust of the adult workers at each factory, Sharp would not have been allowed access to photograph his young subjects, and it took time to build that rapport. “Bad Company” captures an illegal practice marked by hard labor and cruelty, and he chose to process the images in black and white because color distracted from the content. “It’s not a pretty story, it’s not a pretty situation – I wanted to concentrate on form a little more,” he explains. The photographs and related film have since won the Médecins Sans Frontières’s Humanitarian Award. Sharp has not yet published the series editorially; he is waiting for the right fit for his mission, where the images will have the most humanitarian impact.

—Brienne Walsh

Photos © Simon Sharp simonsharpphoto.com