Duplicate this page before you start, and write your answers in your own copy.

🏷️ 1. Today's task

Today you will write two museum labels using the TOK framework. One for a serious piece of art. One for something a long way from a serious piece of art. You choose both pieces.

🧭 2. The knowledge framework

When TOK looks at an area of knowledge, it does so through four elements. You have met these four elements before, and we have been using them across this unit without always naming them.

• Scope. What kind of knowledge does this area produce? What can it tell us, and what can it not?
• Perspectives. Whose viewpoint does this represent? Whose is absent? How do different positions produce different readings?
• Methods and tools. What is used to make and study this knowledge? What do the methods allow, and what do they restrict?
• Ethics. What ethical questions arise from how the knowledge is made, what it depicts, and how it is shared?

These will be the four sections of every label you write today.

🖼️ 3. A worked example

Martin Parr (1952–2025)

New Brighton, England, from The Last Resort, 1983–85

Colour photograph (C-type print)

Tate, London

Scope. Documentary photography produces knowledge of a place at a particular moment, filtered through a single observer's choices. This image gives us social knowledge about British seaside leisure in the 1980s. It cannot tell us what the people in the picture thought or felt.

Perspectives. Parr was a middle-class observer photographing working-class leisure. We see what he chose to show, not what his subjects would have shown of themselves. A photographer from inside the community might have produced very different images of the same beach.

Methods and tools. Parr used a medium-format camera with flash, even in daylight, and high-saturation colour film. The choices flatten skin tones and intensify the colours of food, plastic and clothing. The same scene photographed in soft natural light would feel nostalgic rather than ambivalent.

Ethics. The subjects did not commission the work and may not have known how the photographs would be used. Whether the images critique their subjects, sympathise with them, or do both at once, has been debated since the work first appeared.

Notice what each section ends on. Not praise of the work. Not the photographer's biography. Each section closes on a claim about knowledge: what we can know, what we cannot, what shapes our access to it. That is what makes this a TOK label rather than a museum label.

✍️ Write here: which section of the Parr label do you find most convincing, and which least? Why?