Horst Tappe

Tappe's portrait photographs appeared worldwide for decades in newspapers and magazines and have also been presented in numerous solo exhibitions to the public.

Tappe for many years used to photograph the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977, author of Lolita) and the painter and graphic artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980, who also was the founder of the Salzburg School of Seeing) friends.

Only a few months after the publication of his illustrated book on Kokoschka, Horst Tappe died at the age of 67 years after a short illness at the Hôpital du Samaritain in Vevey.

Portrait photographs of 5,000 writers, visual artists, musicians, politicians and celebrities—among them Konrad Adenauer, Isabel Allende, Willy Brandt, Elias Canetti, Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, Salvador Dalí, Ian Fleming, Patricia Highsmith, Ernst Jünger, Oskar Kokoschka, Gabriel García Márquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, Salman Rushdie, Georges Simenon, Susan Sontag, Wole Soyinka, Igor Stravinsky and Peter Ustinov.

1999: Montreux, Cognac; 2000: St. Malo; 2002: Bern, Sankt Petersburg, Basel, Chiasso; 2003: Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Moscow; 2004: Stuttgart, Paris; 2005: Leipzig, New York, Washington