The images below are the covers of the Collected Instant Photography series of books I am doing and releasing via the print-on-demand Blurb platform.

Roughly, there is/will be (at least) one book for each year.

As of today, the series covers years from 2004 - when I started taking Polaroid photographs - until 2015.

The text below is the introduction to Book One 2004>2007.

For a few years, I have felt the need to print a book of instant photographs. I wanted to make a statement, delineate what I was doing, sum-up my process and what I have been learning meanwhile. But I find it impossible to stop, draw a line and identify a suitable moment to detach myself from what I have been doing so far and ponder on it “from the outside”. Photography for me is not a series but an on-going activity. 
I eventually found a solution to the dilemma: collect everything I contemplate worth of seeing, from day one, shot one, and make a book with that.

I bought my first Polaroid camera at a flee-market in the summer of 2004. It was a plastic box 600 model, grey and green, doomed only to last a few months before breaking for good.

That first 600 was soon followed by many other cameras, which during the years have covered an array of models, types and formats, according to what I could find and afford.

Of all these cameras, my favourite will always remain an Instant AF, the camera with which I truly feel I have started my journey, the one that made me fall in love forever with instant photography. The shot attributable to that instant is titled “Stars in the sink” - you can find it in this book, filed under 2007.

When I was a child, my father was a photographer who in the late 60s/early 70s could travel from one end of Italy to the other in his FIAT 500 to purchase that new Leica lens that no one still owned in our country. He kept his cameras and lenses inside a big metal case and took photography, and 8mm films, very seriously with all his Eumigs, Leicas, the darkroom and the expensive gadgets - but no Polaroids! I tried a few times asking for a Polaroid camera: dad resolutely refused, branding it as too expensive, crappy and “you can’t make prints from Polaroid shots”.

After getting well in my 30s I grew a fascination with Lomography and started shooting with these little cameras and getting into film cross-processing and other weird techniques. Thanks to Lomography, I freed my mind of purisms and thinking about photography as the “serious thing” the way my dad conceived it.

This is how that cheap 600 Polaroid camera came into the frame, and how I came to taste instant photography for the first time.

I can still remember the thrill of the very first shot, taken immediately after getting the camera out of the box, aiming it at a green radiator in the bathroom at home. I believe my own idea of "ordinary imagery" was born in my mind at that precise moment: an ordinary camera, for an ordinary form of photography, had to imply taking ordinary pictures of ordinary appliances.

I am still working on this idea, which has since become one steady issue in my photography. Collecting my instant photographs in these books has the purpose of creating a testimony for my own use: shower curtains, ice molds, street signs, appliques, bedside carpets, blank walls, empty chairs and so on are among the favourite subjects you’ll find here - and that’s where they come from.

For a few years, I have felt the need to print a book of instant photographs. I wanted to make a statement, delineate what I was doing, sum-up my process and what I have been learning meanwhile. But I find it impossible to stop, draw a line and identify a suitable moment to detach myself from what I have been doing so far and ponder on it as if from the outside. Photography for me is not a series but an on-going activity.

I eventually found a solution to the dilemma: collect everything I contemplate worth of seeing, from day one, shot one, and make a book with that.

After 11 years of shooting Polaroid, Fuji and Impossible film, it occurred to me that only on Flickr I have posted more than 400 photographs. Right now there are at least 200 more shots sitting in my hard disk, waiting to see the light: the book idea started to look scary! If I wanted to print a collection of instant shots, it had to be a series of books, split by years. This seemed the only feasible way of doing it, and here is book 1, collecting years 2004 > 2007.

Except for a few cases, all photographs have a date - deduced from Flickr posts, digital scans or plain memory. Photos are mainly arranged based on those dates, because I wanted the story to be told as it happened to me, following the flow I originally created.

Accompanying texts are mostly what I wrote for Flickr posts. These, too, I see as integral parts of the story.

I have not redone the most part of digital scans for the books because the way I scan images is part of the evolution of my photography and tells a story, too. From relatively small scans to high-resolution files for enlarging and printing, I wanted to show not only the temperamental flaws of the medium, but my own ones as well. My fight averse to Newton’s rings, my recurring doubts on how I wanted to keep or edit out frames, the keeping up with possibilities offered by the growing Web and so on - it’s all part of the story, it’s my own evolution.

As I said above, my first ever Polaroid camera entered my life in August 2004 and I still have detailed memories of my first shots. A green bathroom radiator, a shower curtain, a red heart-shaped bedside carpet, taps over white tiles. All these shots are here in these pages, for documentary reasons.

But - does my memory serves me well?

A wealth of lost memories is coming back while I am working on these books. When I started digging through my collection of photos and reviewing all my Flickr posts, I realised how little I shot during the first 3 years. Only a small number of photographs dating from the second half of 2004 and the early months of 2005 seem to exist. 2006 goes completely missing. Instead, there are about 50 shots in 2007, showing I apparently started taking Polaroids more seriously during that year.

So what did I do in Polaroid terms between 2004 and 2006? The answer is: I do not remember, plus there must be a glitch in my cataloguing and online posting habits.

During those years I mainly focused on Lomography cameras and analogue films, but I know I also did Polaroids regularly. I just did not post them to Flickr yet, nor write any dates on their backs. I stowed them all away in a box and forgot about them.

I am positively sure that the order I have reconstructed is wrong in many places and that some of the photos in the 2007 section actually belong to 2006. Misplacing, mistakes, wrong memories all concur. I just don't know anymore what goes where and will never be able to fix this but that’s fine, because this is what Polaroid photography ultimately is: flawed jewels. And who am I to be perfect.

I decided to embrace imperfections and random events that would have an influence on my photography since the moment I started working with Lomography cameras and mistreated films. Polaroids were another step forward on this path.

Though nothing much remains in terms of number of photos, those early years proved important for my path into photography, since they were the beginning of something that would stay with me and have a huge influence on me as a person, not just as a photographer.

Instant photography made me into a more thoughtful and conscious person. Apart from the stellar cost of films, I soon found that there is something that makes instant shots “more special”, that each instant shot is precious – and as such should not go wasted.

Doing instant photography has taught me such great lessons, first of all how you need to get inside the cameras’ mind and start thinking as though these do.

You also need to learn how to embrace chance and all possible flaws that stand at the core of the process.

You grow accustomed to the developing process and the time it takes for an image to reveal itself. I know it is “just” chemicals working their complicated thing, but to me it’s pure magic. It’s a somewhat mindfulness, a path towards meditation.

These things combined, do force you to be careful before you press the button and take the chance. It’s a constant exercise in reflecting and training your eye and your brain to slow down, think about it, ask the “do I really believe this is worth it?” type of questions.

After those early memories of radiators and bedside carpets, there is a flow rather than details of single shots. All I recall is shooting everywhere and everyone, as though I always do, acquiring more Polaroid cameras and carrying them with me most of the time, working my own way through the basics of instant photography.

By the end of 2007 analog photography had become a steady part of my shooting, established in its own terms and acquiring a style of its own.

The story unfolds in these books.