Visual accuracy required detachment from the scene being depicted.

Evidence

The problem, then, for the daguerreotypist visiting the Middle East, or for the writer who desired the same accuracy of representation, was to separate oneself from the world and thus constitute it as a panorama. This required what was now called a ‘point of view’, a position set apart and outside. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 109

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the historically emergent concept of a ‘point of view’ as a produced stance requiring physical separation, not an innate way of seeing.
• DEEPTHINKING: This reframes objectivity as a technological and spatial construction rather than a natural epistemic stance — a paradigm-shifting claim about how Western representation constituted its own authority.
• XREF: connects to: An object’s being shifts between use and detached observation. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 215