Horst Tappe

Background

Horst Tappe was born in 1938 (not 1941 as sometimes published) in Gütersloh.

Education

After basic training in a traditional photo studio and an internship at the Hamburg School of Photography, he attended the courses of Marta Hoepffner at the School of Experimental Photography in Hofheim am Taunus near Frankfurt am Main. At the School of Photography in Vevey, Switzerland, he graduated with Oswald Ruppen.

Career

Tappe was famous for his portraits of creative artists, writers, philosophers, scientists from around the world. From 1965 until his death, and he lived and worked in Territet-Veytaux (Montreux) on Lake Geneva. He regularly traveled to the big cities of Europe, where he photographed personalities from the visual art, literature, music and politics.

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

Both lived like Tappe on Lake Geneva, the photographer immortalized both in innumerable portraits. A selection of these photos—supplemented by citations of those portrayed—has been published in the form of two books

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. 1999: Montreux, Cognac.

2000: Saint Malo; 2002: Bern, Sankt St. Petersburg, Basel, Chiasso.

2003: Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Moscow. 2004: Stuttgart, Paris. 2005: Leipzig, New York, Washington.

Achievements

• Tappe was 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.