The words "art nude" need explaining now that artless feminine skin is available all along the newsagents' top shelves. But they were crucial to the career of photographer Horace Roye, who has been murdered at the age of 96, because, from the 1930s until retirement in 1959, his most successful subjects were nude portraits - 10,000 of them, he estimated.
His photographs delivered the bare necessities, but with originality. The genre was called "artistic" because it borrowed from the roles, and presentation, of nudes in western art, but many of Roye's pictures (especially the clothed sort) really were art, and are now appreciated again. In his 90s, interest in his work revived with the rediscovery of his portfolio by younger snappers.
As a middle-class Edwardian from Aylesbury, Roye had no ambition to become a photographer. He worked in a London department store, possibly intending to join the family drapery firm; then, on being sacked for turning up in tails after a night out, he took the familiar empire exit and sailed for South Africa, in part paying for his passage by boxing in prize fights.
However, after stints as a sheepshearer, a farmer and a diamond smuggler, he returned to London, where he took a number of jobs in the silent movie studios, and married actor Joan Dare.
When marriage and work both failed, Roye opened a film casting agency in Paris, trading on his ability to spot the potential sexual projection of players; he used the skill again, photographically, in the 1940s and 1950s, when the Rank Organisation paid him to shoot its starlets, fully - well, fairly fully-dressed, but touched with naughtiness. Everyone recalled how Roye's surreal crucified nude in gas mask had diverted the public during the Munich crisis, and how his Daily Mirror nudes had preceded, by some years, the stripping of the paper's cartoon heroine Jane to honour D-Day.
First, though, in 1935, Roye set up in Chelsea as a portrait photographer of serious arts clients such as Sir Henry Wood and Toscanini. Then, in 1938, the publisher George Routledge commissioned a collection of nudes, Perfect Womanhood, a book which probably made a greater contribution to wartime morale than Roye's work for the Ministry of Information- producing a propaganda shot of a Nazi officer with a couple of tarts - or his advice on smuggling to MI9, the prisoner-of-war escape operation.
After the war, Rank and other cinema commissions led, through Roye's technical curiosity, to portraits of Diana Dors in 3-D, in the Roye-Vala stereoscopic process, and shots of Margaret Lockwood. More profitably, he sold some 2m nude portraits through the mail - a marketing technique essential at a time when over-the-counter purchase was embarrassing, and selling them might have been an offence.
Roye was, indeed, prosecuted - as he explained in his autobiography, Nude Ego - for refusing to airbrush out pubic hair. He defended himself in court by challenging the abstraction that "art" imposed on naked female models - the Victorian idea that they were less lewd if marmorially smooth and "impersonal as a herring", so that life class became, instead, a still life of flesh.
He won the case, but otherwise lost out. He escaped the scandal by moving to Ireland but was, he said, expelled from there for showing his servants fast magazines. He began a second, financially more successful, career in the Algarve, building and selling luxury villas at Praia da Luz to pals from his raffish social circle in London. Then he moved to live on the Alentejo.
Roye was never discreet about his imperial views - he was rightwing, and supported the Portuguese dictator Salazar. As a result, during the 1974 revolution, he was besieged in his house, holding out with a shotgun, and then forced to sell up and return to England, where he disliked the lack of art in the new men's magazines.
In 1980, Roye made his final move, to what had been a holiday home in the Rabat kasbah, where he remained until he became Morocco's oldest British expatriate; the British ambassador delivered his citation, as the longest-serving member of the British Institute of Professional Photographers, when he was 94. He fed Rabat's stray cats, water-skied on the river Bouregeg until the age of 78, took up parasailing at 75, and swam almost to the end. On one occasion, he reportedly struggled with an intruder who stabbed him with a knife Roye kept under his pillow.
His second wife, Renée Bernadeau, had been a French dancer; he and his third wife, Marilyn, a Canadian model, celebrated their golden wedding before her death in 1993. He had four children, three of whom survive him.
· Horace Roye-Narbeth, photographer, born March 4 1906; died June 11 2002