Behold Mount Everest, reduced to adventure tourism | Jonathan Jones

Everest is not docile, but this line of climbers was seduced by a fantasy that everything should be easier and faster

This is a picture of everything that went wrong in the relationship of humanity with nature. Amid the vast rock of Mount Everest, a long line of people standing in the snow in traffic pedestrian strange. Four people were recently killed in a single day on Everest that day of 150 climbers climbed. It has been argued that the congestion of man has contributed to the tragedy, which seems very likely that consideration of this image. But, as well as help to explain the death, is a picture of how deeply we are failing to have any sort of decent respect for our world: how our love affair with nature has become sick and twisted

Brits are looking back at 60 years of history. The popularity of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen certainly has less to do with respect for the majesty of a recognition that the reign of Elizabeth II spans 60 years of history to think of ourselves of its creation, get a view over a period of radical change. It turns out that one of the most memorable events in the early reign of Queen was the "conquest" of Everest with a statement of the Commonwealth. May 29, 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first human beings ever known have remained atop the highest mountain in the world.

is instructive to compare today's photograph of a line of ants, as the climbers with the image of Hillary Tenzing Norgay on the summit of Everest. In the photograph from 1953 of a man is alone in the snowy summit, which seemed almost on the verge of empty space as a deep blue, dark as thick around dressed. This image of the solitary explorer of the realms of high mountains have cold feet in the romanticism of the early 19: Tenzing Norgay was the only one in the mountains, as Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above the Sea of ??Fog in the painting of 1818 which expresses perfectly the romantic affinity for heights far.

Climbing as a sport

came the Romantic movement. Helvellyn by Sir Walter Scott poem talks about his solo ascent of the peak Laklelands and meditate on the death of a hiker there, whose body lay in his only companion, a faithful dog: these images from the world of people each days - and the lonely death - are part of the myth of the mountain is still very much alive in the stories Touching the Void

• This photograph makes fun of romance. Everest is displayed has been limited to being a destination for tourists can afford extreme overcrowding of 10 to 50 thousand dollars for something different and exotic. An ascent of Mount Everest is not the realization on the edge of the possibility that it was in 1953 on the eve of the space age. If you want to know why so many people are preparing to revive the 1950s nostalgic this weekend could see the corridor of high altitude and reflect much of the innocence has disappeared from the world. The image of the ascending Everest reveals not only many excess market of adventure tourism, but the impact of mind chain technology, why not believe it should be "progress" in 'ascending Everest? That all things should be easier and more accessible?
• think it's because we believe that everything becomes easier, faster and more democratic. Technological advances, improved clothing, supplies more oxygen, which once took years of planning and possible exposure nationally sponsored by a person with the money - we assume. However, if a terrorist has become a docile plaything in the modern imagination.

What

, of course, an illusion. Everest is not sweet. The idea is controllable again exposed as a parasitic fantastic. Modern communications are not recorded when they are too high for helicopters. The tail of the multitudes beyond death and dying. This surreal image is sad, not only about Everest, but it captures the illusions that accelerate the world toward environmental catastrophe.

Find best price for : --Norgay----Tenzing----Everest--