Monkey selfie photographer says he's broke: 'I'm thinking of dog walking'

David Slater has been fighting for years over who has the copyright to photos taken by monkeys using his camera, and says he’s struggling as a result

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco
Thu 13 Jul 2017 01.22 BST

A US appeals court debated whether or not a monkey can own the copyright to a selfie on Wednesday while the photographer whose camera captured the famous image watched a livestream of the proceedings from his home in the UK.

David Slater could not afford the air fare to San Francisco to attend the hearing on Wednesday. Nor can he afford to replace his broken camera equipment, or pay the attorney who has been defending him since the crested black macaque sued him in 2015, and is exploring other ways to earn an income.

The story of the monkey selfie began in 2011, when Slater traveled to Sulawesi, Indonesia, and spent several days following and photographing a troop of macaques. Slater has long maintained that the selfies were the result of his ingenuity in coaxing the monkeys into pressing the shutter while looking into the lens, after he struggled to get them to keep their eyes open for a wide-angle close-up.

“It wasn’t serendipitous monkey behavior,” he said. “It required a lot of knowledge on my behalf, a lot of perseverance, sweat and anguish, and all that stuff.”

The photographs became popular, and Slater said that he earned a few thousand pounds – enough to cover the cost of the trip to Indonesia. But the images became the subject of a complicated legal dispute in 2014, when Slater asked the blog Techdirt and Wikipedia to stop using them without permission.

-snip-