“I changed my name to Sean O’Neal – it’s nothing against my dad but I wanted to have my own path that is not so directly linked to him because it’s just the way people have [always] perceived me,” O’Neal, 28, tells PEOPLE. “I just wanted to forge my own identity.” As for his, at times, complex relationship with his father, he says, “We’re trying to work things out. We have some differences regarding how I should live my life but I respect him and I just want to do things on my own and make it my own way. “We are just getting though some normal father and son stuff. When you grow up in a family like mine, it’s intense and everything is magnified in the media and when you have a lot of powerful people in one family and we have disagreements, they’re more intensified.” O’Neal, a Los Angeles-based photographer, is hoping his first solo exhibition of pictures he took in Nepal after the earthquake – opening June 4, at Hollywood’s LAM Gallery – will help others begin to see him in a new way, for his work, rather than just his name.
“I went to Nepal two months after the earthquake to photograph the aftermath after I was asked by the founder of CITTA.org who had seen some of my photos to accompany them,” says O’Neal.

“They go to the most remote and poorest villages completely off the grid without electricity. One day we went in canoes made out of trees logs to cross a river to get to the village where they were bringing doctors and supplies. The purpose of the show is to immerse people in what it’s like to live in Nepal where they badly need money for infrastructure after massive damage to homes and businesses and where even after one year they are still very little progress. “I had never been to a third world country and I was struck how generous people were. No matter what they had, they would offer us food. Every village, there were 15 or more kids who’d want to carry my equipment for me and even when I’d lay down to rest, they would all pile in and surround me and kept asking me my name, and my age.” O’Neal first fell in love with art when he was a kid and his parents were going through a bitter divorce and custody fight over their three kids. “Growing up, the Met was my sanctuary,” he says. “When things were difficult and there were a lot of those times when I was growing up, I would find myself wandering there and I always found it comforting and soothing to imagine myself in the landscapes.”