Even before Tappe finished his studies in 1965, he had decided to specialise in portraits of writers and artists (his British equivalent perhaps being Mark Gerson). It was a line of work that was essentially an extension of his love of painting and literature.

His first subject was Jean Giono, but his decision to settle in Switzerland brought him close to the two other expatriates with whom he would become most associated, Nabokov and Oskar Kokoschka.

His photographs of the artist are neither formal pictures nor do they focus on him at work. Instead Tappe was given licence to chronicle the rest of his daily life, being helped by Kokoschka’s own interest in photography. He recorded the painter at ease in his garden at Villeneuve and in conversation with his house guest, Ezra Pound.

Tappe also accompanied him to the hanging of an exhibition of Kokoschka’s work at the Tate, and captured him strolling in Hyde Park.

He first met Nabokov in Montreux in 1962, and photographed him regularly until the writer’s death in 1977. In common with his studies of Kokoschka, his pictures reveal another side of Nabokov, not so much his intellectual side as his (no less important) playful one, notably in pursuit of Lepidoptera.

Nevertheless, Tappe was no stranger to the more conventional portrait. Shooting invariably in black and white, his archive of 5,000 images contains a who’s who of postwar European and American high culture. He photographed a dozen Nobel Prize-winning writers, including Saul Bellow, Elias Canetti, Wole Soyinka and T. S. Eliot.

The old guard was represented by Ernst Junger, Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler and Coward (whose photograph was used on a postage stamp) the young Turks by Harold Pinter, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and William Boyd. From Czeslaw Milosz to Imre Kertész, there was almost no writer with whom Tappe was not on first-name terms.

Horst Tappe was born in Westphalia, Germany, in 1938. There he began to study photography, being influenced initially by the Bauhaus. Afterwards he took lessons at Frankfurt and Hamburg, before completing his master’s degree at Vevey, in Switzerland. He made his home in Montreux, although he frequently spent time in London, Paris and Berlin.

Tappe’s other subjects included Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Patricia Highsmith, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez and Anthony Burgess. His work always lent dignity to the sitter without being restrained by politeness. His is not a probing lens, but it was one that invited the famous to reveal what they would to the mirror. The pictures demonstrate a sympathetic curiosity, not one that sought the sensational, merely the essential.

He published books of photographs of Pound and W. H. Auden, as well as collections of his portraits of Nabokov and Kokoschka. A retrospective of the former was exhibited earlier this year in New York, while the latter are on show until October in Montreux.

Tappe died in Vevey. He had been suffering from cancer for some time. He was unmarried.

Horst Tappe, photographer, was born on