Thursday, October 1, 2026
Photographer Michael Ach was still hanging photographs on the Sea Cliff Arts Council building walls as 6 p.m. approached on March 6, and friends, family and art lovers began to fill the space for his newest exhibit. Not every photo Ach chose to include is framed, with many held to the wall by push pins. The display includes five decades of what he called his “greatest hits.”
The former Sea Cliff resident, now living in Glen Cove, spent 22 years as a Newsday staff photographer. Ach attended New York Tech where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts before completing a Master of Fine Arts at C.W. Post. He studied sculpture, which he said later played a role in taking pictures, in addition to using traditional photographic techniques.
“My form was very influenced by my 3D exposure,” Ach said in an interview ahead of the opening. “So, when I photographed and composed, I used the golden rule and those things, but my sense of shape and form was very much influenced.”
This is the second time Ach’s projects have been featured at the arts council. His first exhibit was made up of assemblages, three-dimensional pieces combining preexisting objects into one work.
The photographs in this exhibit come from Ach’s travels across the United States and to other countries like Iceland, India, Nepal and Egypt. On the showroom walls, they are organized by decade from the 1970s through the 2010s. One wall hosts almost exclusively black and white photos, another holds photos entirely in color and the third features Newsday clips from across Ach’s career.
“You see him evolve,” Meaghan Travis, chief operating artist at the arts council, said in an interview on Monday, “as an artist.”
Ach described the exhibit as a “cornucopia” that includes many different ideas. Some pieces on display come from Ach’s photo-essays he put together for Newsday. “Homeless in Suburbia” is one such photo-essay, composed of human centric stills showing the reality of homelessness.
With such a large quantity of photos that could have been shown, Ach said he had to choose which to leave out. Ultimately, he said that after a conversation with arts council Chairperson Kathleen DiResta, he kept many pieces that depict issues in society but left out some of the more graphic ones.
“As a newspaper photographer, there was a lot of heavy stuff,” Ach explained. “and they have yoga (at the arts council) five days a week.” He added that some of the photos he chose not to hang would not have been conducive to a peaceful yoga environment.
Attendees had the opportunity to speak with Ach about his work as they viewed the exhibition at Friday’s opening. While Ach has done photography in both journalistic and artistic ways, he said in the interview that his approach to the artform did not differ greatly between the two.
“Empathy and humanism,” he said, “were always at the forefront of both.”
Ach conducted his first artist talk at the arts council on Sunday and will hold two more, one on Saturday and the other on April 19. He said he will be discussing successes and failures throughout his career.
“It’s pretty incredible,” Travis said. “It’s inspiring, so that’s what we aim to do. We just want to make art accessible to everybody in the community.”
The exhibit will be on display at the arts council building at 86 Roslyn Ave. through April.
