Early Works

Early Works is a scrapbook of photographs and captions from Ivars Gravlejs's schooldays in Latvia in the 1990s, in which he stages mock-serious art projects at the expense of his teachers and classmates.

Gravlejs got a camera at eleven and used it as a way to survive a school where, he writes, teachers humiliated him. The book has eight sections, among them "Conceptual", "Pop art" and "Actions", each borrowing the manner of contemporary art: a pile of soda cans as a readymade, toy soldiers in a staged battle, eggs and a sausage arranged as a surreal scene. Gravlejs appears in many of the pictures, and his captions are frank and self-mocking. MACK published it in July 2015 as a 144-page softcover in color, and it was shortlisted for the 2015 First Book Award. MACK issued signed and unsigned editions.

Gravlejs was born in 1979. He is a Latvian photographer who lives and works in Prague. He studied photography there at the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) from 2000 to 2007. He now teaches photography in Latvia and the Czech Republic.