Gay

Duane Michals born 18 February 1932

Duane Michals is an American photographer. Largely self-taught, his work is noted for its innovation and artistry. Michals' style often features photo-sequences and the incorporation of text to examine emotion and philosophy, resulting in a unique body of work.

Michals grew up in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. In 1953 he received a BA from the University of Denver. In 1956 he went on to study design at the Parsons School of Design with a plan to becoming a graphic designer, however he did not complete his studies.

In 1958 while on a holiday in the USSR he discovered an interest in photography. The photographs he made during this trip became his first exhibition held in 1963 at the Underground Gallery in New York City. Duane Michals settled in New York in the late 1950s and became known as a commercial and fashion photographer.

For a number of years, Michals worked in commercial photography, working for Esquire and Mademoiselle, and he covered the filming of The Great Gatsby for Vogue (1974). He did not have a studio. Instead, he took portraits of people in their environment, which was a contrast to the method of other photographers at the time, such as Avedon and Irving Penn. In 1968 Michals was hired by the government of Mexico to photograph the 1968 Olympic Games. In 1970 his works were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

He has published over twenty books of his work, including The Portraits of Duane Michals 1958-1988 (1989).

His early work became well known for its insistent, and often humorous, use of the narrative series. Many such works actually incorporated handwritten text onto the images. Thematically, Michals has a recurrent fascination with making tangible the intangible realm of love, death, dreams, and wishes. His works deal with human sexuality, both straight and gay, but always in a charmingly moving and innocent manner.

The portraits he took between 1958 and 1988 would later become the basis of his book Album.

In 1976 Michals received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Michals also produced the art for The Police album Synchronicity in 1983, and Richard Barone's Clouds Over Eden album in 1993.

Michals has been in a relationship with his partner for 50 years. Though he has not been involved in gay civil rights, his photography has regularly addressed gay themes and quietly added to the storehouse of twentieth-century gay imagery.

Ned Sherrin born 18 February 1931 (d. 2007)

Edward George Sherrin, better known as Ned Sherrin, was an English broadcaster, author and stage director. But more than that he was he was a humorist, anecdotalist, raconteur, impresario, producer, presenter, playwright, and actor - a veritable renaissance man.

Sherrin was born in Somerset, a million miles away from the theatrical and broadcasting world he came to embody. His father ran a farm and Sherrin confessed he didn't like getting his hands dirty.

National Service took him away from the milking and his subsequent time at Oxford gave him his first real taste of the theatre, first in serious drama, later in revue. There, he discovered that his talent lay not so much in writing and performing as in producing. Nevertheless, after gaining a law degree, he trained as a barrister and was called to the bar in 1955. But any thought of a legal career was soon banished when an old friend he met in the street offered him a producer job at Associated Television.

In his autobiography, Sherrin wrote: 'In a long career of happy accidents, perhaps the most useful was to have been born in 1931 and to complete National Service, Oxford and bar exams precisely in time for the opening of commercial television.'

Commercial television gave him his break, but the BBC made Ned Sherrin's name. In 1957 he moved to the Corporation and directed the Tonight programme along with presenters Cliff Michelmore, Fyfe Robertson, Alan Whicker et al.

Then, in 1962 came That Was The Week That Was (TW3) which contained not only satire but also serious interviews, sketches and music too. Sherrin said the format came about as a way of combining 'the two things that I'd always enjoyed most - which were a lively interest in current affairs and a terrible fascination for vaudeville, musicals and old jokes'.

Hosted by a young David Frost, the show was to prove controversial in the way it poked fun at politicians not used to such irreverence. It became essential Saturday night viewing for some 12 million people.

Sherrin described the programme's brief at the time as 'aware, pointed, irreverent, fundamentally serious, intelligently witty, outspoken in the proper sense of the word'.

TW3 also launched the careers of writers and performers such as Dennis Potter, Willie Rushton, Kenneth Cope, Lance Percival and Millicent Martin.

The show was taken off after two years - it had proved too contentious, especially with an election approaching. But there were follow-up programmes in similar vein such as Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, and BBC3.

Sherrin then turned his attention to writing, producing and directing for the stage and screen, often in collaboration with the writer and critic, Caryl Brahms.

He produced several West End plays and musicals including I Gotta Shoe and The Mitford Girls. He also directed the highly successful Side By Side by Sondheim and Keith Waterhouse's Jeffrey Barnard is Unwell with Peter O'Toole in the title role. On screen, he directed The Virgin Soldiers, Up Pompeii and The National Health among others.

A great raconteur, Sherrin won the Benedictine 'After Dinner Speaker of the Year' award in 1991 and was made a CBE in 1997. He also compiled anthologies of theatrical anecdotes and humorous quotations.

Sherrin's great store of funny stories made him ideally suited to radio programmes such as BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends, which he presented between 1986 and December 2006, and music quiz Counterpoint.

Asked once about the worst aspect of his radio career, he said: 'I can't think of a bad thing about it. If I wasn't being paid for it I would be doing it as a hobby.'

For more than half a century, his urbane wit influenced so much of Britain's artistic life, in the theatre, on screen and on the air.

Openly gay, he was a patron of the London Gay Symphony Orchestra. He died of complications of throat cancer on 1 October 2007, aged 76.

BBC Obituary: Ned Sherrin