Photographs by Dotan Saguy of a Brazilian family living in a converted yellow school bus in Los Angeles

They had come to the United States two years prior to chase the American Dream. While they quickly found financial footing in the US and acquired all the material things they wanted, they were still not happy. Inspired by a YouTube video by a Brazilian artist who quit everything to travel and sell his art, they decided to explore an alternative lifestyle that would allow them to spend more time as a family and discover the world together through travel.

In Nowhere to Go but Everywhere, Saguy documents artfully and with compassion the Reis family’s trials and tribulations during their ten-month stop in the City of Angels as they struggle to make it as vehicle dwellers, improvised mechanics, unconventional parents, Mormonism doubters, and experimental breadwinners while seeking happiness as a family.

Brought together in a new book, published by Kehrer, this heartening series transports the viewer into the Reis family’s bustling, cramped living quarters where parents and children live on top of one another but don’t seem to mind.

We feel their warmth, and we witness joy, love, laughter and tenderness. Saguy captures the daily activities – preparing meals, eating together, doing chores, having home school lessons, doing homework, playing with toys, and enjoying alone time.

The Reis family experienced happy times and also tough times. During one such hard time that Ismael describes as “three hellish days,” the bus broke down, they got kicked out of the parking lot that served as their refuge, their baby girl hit her head and had to be rushed to the emergency room, the parents’ faith in the Mormon religion collapsed and Greice, the mom, had to get an abortion they were very conflicted about. All this came after a tumultuous cross-country journey during which they ran out of money for food and gas and Ismael was forced to beg on the street.

Today, over 16,000 people in Los Angeles County live in a vehicle. While vehicle dwelling is not a new phenomenon, the numbers are sharply on the rise. Just like for the rest of the homeless population, individual circumstances are diverse – they range from couch-surfing students occasionally using their car as a fallback accommodation to financially down-and-out individuals who have lost everything but their car and its contents.

Regardless of what brings people to live this way, a common denominator seems to be low wages and the lack of affordable housing. The Reis family decided to live in a bus in order to spend more time together as a family. For them, it was a rational decision that cut their living expenses by ninety per cent, while allowing Ismael Reis to stay home with his family instead of having to work long hours seven days a week to make rent.

In his interview in the book, conducted by Dotan Saguy, Ismael explains: "A big benefit of this lifestyle, in my opinion, is family relationships: We relate to each other very differently than when we had a house. I believe that living together in such tight quarters helps [Greice and me] as individuals and as a couple to get to know each other better and get to know ourselves better. To find ourselves.

"I don’t think my dad knew half of what I know about my kids when I was their age because he was always at work. We never had any time to spend together. He didn’t have time to get to know me. That’s why I used to fight a lot with my parents. I didn’t feel like they knew me.”

Dotan Saguy was born in a small kibbutz five miles south of Israel’s Lebanese border. He grew up in a diverse working-class Parisian suburb, lived in Lower Manhattan during 9/11 and moved to Los Angeles in 2003.

In 2015, Saguy decided to focus on his lifelong passion for photography after a successful career as a high-tech entrepreneur. Since then Saguy attended the prestigious Eddie Adams Workshop, Missouri Photo Workshop and studied photojournalism at Santa Monica College. Saguy's award-winning photographs have been published by National Geographic, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times and many others.

Discover more at www.dotansaguy.com. Nowhere to Go but Everywhere will publish in the US on 1 September 2020, while in the UK and Europe it will hit the stores on 30 June 2020.