Michael Ast

Photographer

Michael Ast (b. 1973) resides in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania.  He has worked professionally as both a photojournalist and commercial photographer since the late 1990’s.  He focuses primarily on personal photo-based work now,  employing his sense of photographic narrative, utilizing a mixture of self-expression and photo documentation. Viewers can see such approach in his published photobooks, zines, printmaking and photographic series.

In his photographs, Michael applies a trained and nuanced eye influenced heavily from his experience and education as a photojournalist. He graduated a Bachelor of Journalism (1996) from Boston University’s School of Communication. “I concentrated in photojournalism, embracing the reportage concepts of the photo essay,” he says.  The conceptual framework of the photo essay is apparent in many of his photographic series.  Michael is more concerned with formulating a body of images, not so much individual ones.   Firm in his belief that art making positions us closer to feeling and defining the ineffable nature of things, he works his photographs together, aiming to facilitate a relationship with the intangible. Michael was born and raised in Bucks County.  He has a vast, ongoing Bucks County photographic archive, spanning nearly 3 decades from his extensive documentation of the region.  He’s currently editing his third photobook depicting Spinnerstown, Pennsylvania (Upper Bucks), a few miles from the Lehigh county line, where he lives with his wife Angela and 2 children.   Angela and him own and operate ABCA Design, their interior design company, established in 2017.