In the early 1990s, an eleven-year-old in Latvia acquired a camera and turned it against the institution that made him nauseous: school. Ivars Gravlejs’s Early Works, published by MACK in 2015, assembles photographs, montages, and captions from those years into an eccentric scrapbook. Eight sections—among them ‘Conceptual’, ‘Pop art’, and ‘Actions’—trace the phases of a voracious, parodic curiosity, each one a small parody of the adult art world.

The book’s comedy is systematic. Gravlejs stages a readymade from soda cans, reconstructs battles with toy soldiers, engineers surreal unions of eggs and sausage. He lampoons classmates and teachers, poses as dead drunk, mimes terrorism. The gesture of art becomes an instrument of anarchy, a way to win small victories in the domain of the image. His captions, unsparingly honest, deepen the self-mockery and keep the tone off-balance.

What makes Early Works more than a juvenile prank is its uncertainty. We never quite know how close Gravlejs stands to the prodigy he presents. Is this younger self a genuine archive, or a protagonist assembled from appropriation, manipulation, and intervention? That tension—between documentation and construction—gives the book its lasting charge.

For collectors, Early Works matters as the foundation of a career. Gravlejs (b. 1979) later studied at FAMU in Prague and now teaches photography in Latvia and the Czech Republic. The book’s eight-part structure and its deadpan captions show an artist already thinking in series and personas, using humor to interrogate authority. Published by MACK, it is an early, distinctive entry in the photobook’s long engagement with staged childhood and institutional critique.