Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity overturns the assumption that scientific objectivity is timeless, arguing instead that it emerged historically in the nineteenth century as a specific epistemic virtue: the disciplined suppression of the knowing self. Their study traces this transformation through scientific atlases, whose images did not merely illustrate knowledge but trained communities to see, classify and compare the natural world. Before objectivity, atlas-makers pursued truth-to-nature, selecting and perfecting specimens in order to reveal an ideal type beneath natural variation. The prologue’s case of Arthur Worthington’s splash experiments crystallises the shift: his hand-drawn symmetrical droplets once expressed scientific judgement, but instantaneous photography exposed irregular forms and forced him to confront the authority of “blind sight”. Mechanical objectivity thus required scientists to restrain interpretation, allowing instruments to record accidents, asymmetries and imperfections that earlier traditions would have corrected. Yet Daston and Galison refuse a simple succession narrative. Later trained judgment did not abolish objectivity; it responded to its limits, recognising that scientific images often require expert intervention to become meaningful. The atlas therefore becomes a case study in the making of scientific selves: each visual regime demands a different moral discipline, from idealising nature, to suppressing subjectivity, to cultivating interpretive expertise. The conclusion is profound: objectivity is not the absence of history, but one historical way of seeing, inseparable from practices, instruments and ethical formations of the observer.