I wonder what Sir Edmund Hillary would make of today’s 'snap everything' culture, driven by camera phones and social media.
I’m sure he would be astounded that millions of people now seem to think their dinner is worthy of a quick JPEG, when he didn’t even consider that becoming the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest – the tallest mountain on Earth, at 8,848m – worthy of a self-portrait.
In 1953, the New Zealand-born Hillary (1919-2008), alongside Nepalese-Indian mountaineer Tenzing Norgay (1914-1986), became one of the first confirmed teams to stand atop the highest point on the planet.
In doing so they not only made mountaineering history, but also challenged long-held scientific beliefs that the human body could never endure such extreme conditions.
Given the magnitude of the moment, you’d think Hillary – who took the famous photograph of Norgay at the summit holding an ice pick wrapped with the British, Nepali, Indian and United Nations flags – would have wanted a photograph of himself, too. But apparently not.
Following the monumental climb and his immediate knighthood, Hillary purportedly said: “Why did I need a photograph? I knew I'd been there and that was good enough for me.”
When I first came across the quote, I was genuinely stunned. For a brief moment, I even wondered whether Hillary had been suffering from oxygen deprivation to have said it.
But then I remembered: Hillary wasn’t a product of modern photographic culture, which constantly pressures us to document every aspect of our lives as proof that we experienced it.
The truth is, 99.9% of the photos we take will never be looked at again. They simply become meaningless clutter sitting in cloud storage – and deep down, we all know it.
Can you imagine someone accomplishing something as extraordinary today and returning home without even a single self-portrait? By modern standards, it would seem preposterous.
Even I, as someone who dislikes the pressure to photograph everything, doubt I would be immune to Hillary’s seemingly innate ability to refuse a selfie if I ever achieved something as remotely incredible as he did.
Despite the lightheadedness he must have been experiencing after removing his mask to photograph Norgay at the summit, I suspect Hillary was more present in that moment than most of us ever are, knowing exactly what he was refusing.
That mentality is something we’ve largely lost in recent years, thanks to the instant access we now have to cameras and unlimited storage, yet it’s something we could all benefit from rediscovering.
If Edmund Hillary didn’t feel the need for a photograph after becoming arguably one of the two greatest mountaineers of all time, then perhaps we don’t need quite so many pictures of our outfits or well-presented Sunday lunches, either. And I certainly don’t need an umpteenth picture of the sunset.
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