プラハを拠点に活動するラトビア人写真家、アイヴァース・グラヴェレジズ（Ivars Gravlejs）の初となる作品集。"先生たちから屈辱的に扱われるので、学校に行く前はいつもイライラしていた。写真を撮るか、映画を撮るか、何か作ることが学校で生き延びるための唯一の手段だった" と彼自身が記したように、1990年代のラトビアでの学生時代を記録した風変わりなスクラップブックの中で、作者は学校という小さな国家に写真を撮ることで反乱を起こしていた。"Conceptual" や "Pop art" などから成る8つの章は作者の興味を反映し、各章にあるイメージは同級生や先生たちを撮影し、残酷に切り抜いたりモンタージュしたりして作り出された。本書は、大人の世界のルールや原則、美的感覚を嘲笑しているかのようである。

An eccentric scrapbook documenting Ivars Gravlejs schooldays in Latvia during the 1990s. Aged 11, Gravlejs acquired a camera, soon deployed in unrestrained rebellion against authority – the small state of the school. Gravlejs writes, “I often felt nauseous before going to school because of the humiliation that I faced from my teachers. The only way to survive school was to do something creative - to take pictures and make movies.” Early Works satirises of the rules and aesthetic principles of the adult world. Eight sections trace the various phases of Gravlejs's encyclopaedic curiosity, including ‘Conceptual’, ‘Pop art’ and 'Actions', parroting the tropes of contemporary art, in emanations of the readymade (a pop art stockpile of soda cans), fake historical reconstructions (toy soldiers in battle) and surreal compositions (the erotic union of eggs and a sausage). In all the images, Gravlejs uses the gesture of art as an instrument of anarchy, lampooning his classmates and teachers in fiendish montages, winning small victories in the domain of the image. Pandemonium reins, as the young Gravlejs shapeshifts across the pages, here pretending to be 'dead drunk', sprawled out like an inebriated adult, and there caught in a mock act of terrorism, shifting railroad tracks in theatrical dark glasses. Authoring captions that offer unsparingly honest vignettes to account for each image, Gravlejs's tone is one of utter self-mockery; and yet we are never quite sure of Gravlejs own proximity to the prodigy of Early Works – as a younger self he teases, spoofs, and employs to bite back at society, but also a protagonist assembled from a world of appropriation, manipulation and intervention.