Ivars Gravlejs is a Latvian photographer and photography professor at the BUT Faculty of Fine Arts (Brno, Czech Republic). Born in 1979, in Riga, Ivars was growing up at the time of great change and transformation in the Latvian society, a result of Perestroika (“Rebuilding”, a term coined by Mikhail Gorbachev in Leningrad and popularized by the media) which means the collapse of the Soviet Union. His work fluctuates between personal documentary photography and conceptual internet art.

As Gravlejs approached his teenage years, he began experimenting with art-making techniques that directly harnessed his scathing perception of the surrounding environment. His childhood archive of collages and photographs was released in the ‘Early Works’ book in 2015