TOK Photo: Concept Activity
My initial answer to this question was: “I have no idea.” I was making observations, but I did not know enough about the context to make any confident interpretations. However, looking a little bit deeper into the photo I made the assumption that there is a man stuck in a whole and the police have come to confront him. I have made this assumption based on evidence in the photo where I can see the head of a man in a muddy puddle, there are a few policemen on motorbikes one of whom is staring directly at the man in the puddle. I have inferred that this eye contact is confrontational and since I am so unsure about the actions of the photo I am also using past knowledge of situations with policemen to make the claim that this a confrontation. Generally as soon as I saw this photo I caught myself trying to draw up past knowledge and experiences to make sense of this photo because the things that I saw in front of me didn’t make logical sense. I was thinking things like “this look like its in..”, “it reminds of..” “I’ve seen something like…before”
Additionally, because I am making an uncertain claim, and especially because I am communicating it on my portfolio, I feel I have a responsibility to also acknowledge that obviously, my reference isn’t certain because it’s just my perspective. However, the nature of the photo is such that not every element is clear and even some of the observations I am making about background details are really just assumptions made based on other knowledge.