Home Is Where You Park It: Kickstarter Project

I started taking photos of vans and other campers that I came across in my travels in the fall of 2011. After rationalizing my interest in these campers, I wrote a post and put together some photos on my blog for a post called Vanlife. Here's how it read:

"Not until experiencing something for myself can I really appreciate it. Call me thick headed, but it’s been true about autumn in New England, sex, and most recently, camper vehicles, or as I call it, van life. I purchased my Syncro with no prior knowledge of van life. Operating on the assumption that I liked the freedom and exploration offered by living out of a van, I committed to trying it out. A handful of interesting people’s stories of the road reassured me that it was the right thing to do. Ships of the open road are hard to understand when you’re not sailing them. Now that I am sailing my own, I have grown to appreciate the breed of adventurers they attract and the vehicles they drive."

Two years later, I am just as excited to see a camper parked for the night or hanging out on the side of the highway. The vanlife hash tag has around 50k tags and I've photographed hundreds of campers. Some of the most inspiring and happiest people I've ever met live in there vehicles by choice. To document their campers and celebrate the notion that living in your car is fun, I'm launching a Kickstarter today to publish a photo book and some other vanlife related swag. To help with the design of the book, t-shirt and bumper stickers, I enlisted the help of some friends from Doubleday & Cartwright, a creative studio in New York that makes tshirts, The Victory Journal and works on special projects for brands like Nike, Puma and Samsung.

The book is going to be an 11x11 inch square and will have around 125 pages. We are still finalizing layout and I have to dial in the intro. It will have an extended intro about my moving into a van, photos of my favorite campers and then a handful of anecdotes of my encounters with fellow travelers. The book is $65 shipped in the US and will be signed by yours truly.

A sample spread with @specialopz's Vanagon in Mexico and Ford Econoline Camper near Ventura, California.

A full bleed or two never hurt anyone.

Another sample spread with Nick Dirk's Van and a VW T2 in Portland Oregon.

Inspired by the 70s art of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Comics and R Crumb, we made a limited edition pocket T-shirt. It's available in sizes Extra Small to Extra Large and comes in heather grey or white. Shirts are $35 shipped in the US.

How do you dress up a t-shirt? Put a Pocket and a Vanlife/Home Is Where You Park it Logo On It.

Riffing on the similar inspiration as the T-shirt, we also made a handful of bumper stickers celebrating vehicular dwellers. Use with discretion though, the square community might object to these. $10 for your choice of one large and one small. Sizes ranging from 13" to 3".