Inspired by a photographer friend, I bought my first Instax Wide camera in 2012. Within a few months I was fully smitten. I carried it everywhere, and it was often first out of the bag when exploring new subjects. The camera was wonderfully simple. Just two focal settings, 3 exposure settings, and a shutter button. Aim and shoot, that was pretty much it. Needless to say a lot of my photographs made this way weren’t worth a damn. But a surprising number of them were. In fact some proved quite fantastic. The colors were vivid and surreal, and there were often quirks in development or exposure which I couldn’t figure out or duplicate. I kept the good ones in glassine envelopes, bindered up on a shelf. Eventually I had several hundred pictures. Need Clean Fill collects a few dozen of these early Instax experiments, from roughly 2012 through 2014. 
It’s now 2020 as I write this, three years since I gave up the Instax camera. The plastic bodies eventually proved too fragile —I probably went through 5 over a four year period— and the Instax prints too unmanageable. I still have thousands sitting in small piles in my office, along with 4 old broken Instax cameras. I can’t quite throw them out but I’m not sure what to do with them. The story of every photographer, I suppose.
-B, 3/20

Published by Bump Books
Edited by David Solomons
Publication date: May 2020
Size: 210mm x 148mm
Cover: uncoated 170gsm digital
Text: uncoated 120gsm digital
Pages: 32
Images: 26
Printed in the UK
Edition of 200