Sam Reiser has turned a yellow school bus into a tiny home on wheels
A school bus was born in 2001 in Suffolk County, N.Y. Since then, its floors have creased homework in all the wrong places with the pressure of eager Sketcher stomps. Its raisin-textured pleather seats maintain purple pen ink graffiti of cat-dogs and mermaids. Its windows have been regularly pressed upon by the small, salty noses of students past.
Sam Reiser did not grow up riding school buses in Australia. He pries the seats from their metal sockets and piles them up, creating a car-seat catacomb. He seals the windows for winter and scrubs the grime from the broad side of the bus’s exterior. He proceeds to transform the bus into a home.
Reiser is the remora that cleans the sharky teeth of what he believes is an extravagantly materialistic world. By reusing the school bus, he is able to conserve space and stick to the bare necessities needed for a nomadic lifestyle.
Reiser is a world traveler and adventure photographer. His most recent trip found him spending hours on the road. He enjoys driving.
“If you’re with someone, you get to spend a huge amount of time getting to know who someone is,” Reiser said, “If you’re not, it gives you a lot of time for personal reflection.”
Reiser drove from Mexico to the north pole, documenting his journey through photographs.He enjoys blending portraiture and the natural elements of land.
“It’s not placing a subject in a position, up close, where there’s no hiding,” Reiser said, “it’s putting them in a landscape in which you have to search for them.”
Reiser says he wants to use the school bus as a tool for travel. He invites his friends and social media followers to help him work on its transformation. He keeps it parked in his friend’s front yard for the time-being, where he spends almost every day working on the bus. He says that he plans to be done with the project by June and is working on gathering a few of his close friends and traveling to Utah in his new tiny home.
Reiser is fascinated by the idea of different perspectives, which he says will be a main theme for his future travel experiences. Reiser decided that his five-year plan involves staying in America, practicing photography, and saving up for a motorbike and mountaineering trip from England to Australia.
“I came up with this idea of going from my home to my home,” said Reiser.
~ 12.6.2018