Two creators meet: Ron Agam and David Smith on photography, art and AI

PUBLISHED: August 22, 2026 | www.baltimoresun.com

There are interviews in which the questions produce answers. Then there are conversations in which something unexpected happens: Two people discover that, despite coming from seemingly different worlds, they have been speaking the same language all their lives.

That is what happened when internationally renowned artist and photographer Ron Agam joined my business partner and “Front Page Authority” podcast co-host David Smith for what began as a discussion about photography and evolved into something far richer — a conversation about creativity, discipline, technology, beauty, memory, faith, business and the enduring need of human beings to create.

Agam carries one of the most recognizable names in contemporary art. He is the son of Yaacov Agam, the legendary pioneer of kinetic art whose work transformed the relationship between art, movement and the viewer.

Smith, who also co-owns The Baltimore Sun, is known to Maryland primarily as a businessman and entrepreneur who has spent decades building companies and creating institutions. Yet very few people know the depth of his artistic instinct. Photography, woodworking, furniture making and craftsmanship are not casual diversions for him. They reveal another dimension of a man whose business career has always been rooted in the same impulse: to build something where nothing existed before.

What follows is an edited and condensed version of our Front Page Authority conversation.

David, we are stepping outside what people might consider our normal territory today. But I have always admired this side of you — the photography, the woodworking, furniture, building things with your hands. Art can take many forms. What does art mean to you?

Smith: I view art as an essential component of what could be everybody’s life. It gives you an opportunity to be creative and to do things you otherwise wouldn’t do.

For me, it is about creation.

There is something enormously fulfilling about making something and then standing back and saying, “Look what I created.”

But probably the most fulfilling part is when somebody else looks at what you’ve created and says, “I really like that. Can I buy it?”

And I normally say, “No. You can have it.”

That may be the best part of art — creating something that touches another person and then being able to give it to them.

Ron, before the world knew you as an artist, you were the son of Yaacov Agam. What did that mean inside your home — not publicly, but privately?

Agam: When you are a child, you don’t measure these things the way you do later.

Your world is small. You go to kindergarten. You go to school. You think you are like everybody else.

I probably began understanding when I was 11 or 12. I saw how people treated my father. I saw the respect he received and realized that he was somebody very important in his world.

We were living in Paris, and France at that time had President Georges Pompidou, who was extremely cultured. He loved literature and art, and he believed France could not simply live in its past.

Pompidou saw one of my father’s sculptures in an exhibition, invited him to the Élysée Palace and eventually asked him to rethink part of the presidential apartments.

That became the Salon Agam.

As a child, you slowly begin realizing: My father is doing something different.

Did you ever consciously resist becoming an artist because you didn’t want your life measured against your father?

Agam: Photography came first.

When I was about 6 years old, I walked into a darkroom. My father had professional photographers documenting his work.

I saw somebody take a white piece of paper and put it into liquid — and suddenly an image appeared.

I was mesmerized.

I immediately went to my father and asked him to lend me a camera.

Photography became a passion and never left me.

Painting was different. I never dreamed I would become a painter. Subconsciously, maybe I resisted it. I sometimes say: If your father is Einstein, are you going into physics?

I didn’t want to enter something where I felt I couldn’t reach the level of my own ambition.

Then, when I was 52, I experienced a serious personal crisis and depression. I began looking at photographs of myself as a very young child painting beside my father.

Something opened inside me.

I closed myself away for months and began painting. I didn’t announce it. I wasn’t thinking about selling anything.

I painted because it made me feel better.

That became the seed of everything that followed.

David, you have also been deeply involved in photography. When does a photograph stop simply recording a moment and become art?

Smith: I experienced almost exactly what Ron did.

I was 15 years old in high school. I took a photography class almost as a goof. Then I walked into the darkroom and watched a piece of paper go into the developer.

Suddenly there was a picture.

I thought, “My God, look at that. That’s really cool.”

Eventually I built both black-and-white and full-color labs in my house.

Then in 2001 I went to Africa carrying traditional film cameras along with one of the early Fuji digital cameras. I came home, put that little memory chip into the computer, and that was essentially the end of film for me.

The efficiency changed everything.

But what film teaches you is discipline.

When you set up a large-format camera on a tripod, meter the light, focus carefully and prepare every part of the photograph, you don’t shoot casually.

When you drag out the tripod and go through the entire process, it becomes almost a religion.

Digital photography gives you another freedom — you can shoot 8,000 photographs and select three.

But film forced thought before the shutter.

Ron, what does your eye see through a camera that the average person may completely miss?

Agam: People. Faces. Faces have always fascinated me.

Years ago, I photographed people at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. When I developed the contact sheets, I saw something I had not expected.

There was something in those faces.

Those photographs eventually became my first major public photography exhibition in New York.

And then history intervened.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died, and her funeral was held across from where my exhibition was showing. Hundreds of journalists and photographers were suddenly in that neighborhood.

Then, not long afterward, the Lubavitcher Rebbe died in Brooklyn, and there was enormous curiosity about Jewish spiritual life.

My photographs of Hasidic Jews suddenly received tremendous attention.

Photography has often been like that for me — you prepare, you work, but then history places you somewhere you never anticipated.

You also developed a relationship with Madonna through those photographs.

Agam: Yes. She eventually acquired a significant number of photographs.

Later, when a book of my photography was being prepared, Mayor Rudy Giuliani wrote something for it, and Madonna also contributed.

I used to joke that I had two of the most famous Italians in America associated with the same book, coming from completely different political and cultural worlds.

That is also something art can do.

It connects people who otherwise might never be connected.

Smith: I’ve always believed there is a photograph for everybody.

The question is simply how many people have to see it before somebody says, “That affects me.”

That’s the remarkable thing about art.

Agam: Exactly.

I spent almost two years photographing flowers.

Then I had a major exhibition in New York in November 2008 — right in the middle of the financial collapse.

People walked into the gallery devastated. Some had lost enormous amounts of money.

Then they saw these enormous photographs of flowers — some 6 feet tall — and their faces changed.

They smiled.

Think about that.

Nothing in their financial situation had changed. Their problems were still outside the gallery.

But for a moment, art changed what they felt.

That is its power.

Ron, artists are constantly told they must develop an unmistakable signature. How did you find yours while carrying one of contemporary art’s most recognizable surnames?

Agam: With tremendous difficulty.

My friend Bernard-Henri Lévy once told me, “Ron, you probably would have been better off with another last name.”

There is truth in that.

But I grew up around art. I understood the environment.

And I never began by asking, “Will this sell?”

I was preoccupied with creating.

Eventually my three-dimensional lenticular works became very important for me because I found something distinctive — something that felt like my own language.

Movement is central to those works. The image changes as the viewer moves. Why is movement so important?

Agam: My father always said that the most constant thing in life is change.

For centuries, art struggled with how to express that.

Kinetic art changed the relationship between viewer and artwork because the viewer participates. As you move, the work changes.

That is closer to life itself.

Nothing is truly static.

The person looking at the artwork changes. The light changes. The angle changes. Time changes.

Art can remind us of that.”

David, what strikes you hearing Ron describe that?

Smith: Ron and I share something fundamental.

We’re both creators.

Whether you create a company, a photograph, furniture, sculpture, whatever it may be, people who create understand each other.

The scales may be different. The medium may be different.

But the instinct is the same.

You look at something that doesn’t exist and think: “I can make that.”

Ron, you have never hidden your beliefs behind the canvas. You speak publicly. You fight antisemitism. Where did that activism originate?

Agam: When I was about 10 years old in Paris, I loved roller-skating and entered competitions. There was a major competition, and I won.

A woman whose son finished second began screaming an antisemitic slur at me.

I went home to my mother and said, “Somebody called me a dirty Jew, but I take two showers a day.”

I didn’t fully understand what she meant.

But the incident stayed with me forever.

In some ways, I became an activist at 10 years old.

When issues affecting Jewish people arose, I could never simply stand to the side.

David, art celebrates rebellion aesthetically, but society often becomes uncomfortable when the artist expresses genuine ideological disagreement. Has much changed?

Smith: Human behavior doesn’t change very much. But there is something people have in common: Everybody responds to art. It doesn’t matter who you are.

People may love completely different kinds of art, but art affects human beings.

Photography affects people.

Music affects people.

Movies affect people.

Poetry affects people.

That is what makes it so important.

And today technology has essentially made everyone a potential photographer or artist.

Smith: That’s one of the biggest changes.

Go back to the era of Ansel Adams. There were relatively few photographers operating at that level.

Today everybody has a camera.

Everybody with a computer can make something.

Everybody can call himself an artist.

That dramatically expands creativity, which is wonderful, but it also creates a challenge for professional artists.

How do you distinguish exceptional work when billions of images are being created?

The barrier to making something has disappeared.

The new barrier is creating something meaningful.

Agam: I saw a remarkable example of that in Carrara, Italy.

Carrara is famous for marble.

I walked into a facility and saw an enormous machine making a replica of a Michelangelo sculpture.

A sophisticated CNC machine could do in approximately a week something that once required an artist years of labor.

It was extraordinary.

Smith: But it’s still art.

Agam: Yes. Because, at least for now, somewhere a human being still has to imagine what should be made.

Which brings us directly to artificial intelligence. When machines can generate extraordinary images almost instantly, what remains uniquely human about the artist?

Smith: Somebody still has to tell the AI what they want. That’s the human element. You tell it: Make this.

Then you modify it. You iterate. You change it until it expresses what you were trying to create.

So ultimately, I still see the creative process as human-controlled.

Agam: I agree, but I am more cautious.

Every generation produces new technology.

Etching allowed images to be reproduced. Then came lithography, serigraphy, photography, digital printing and everything that followed.

AI is another technological transformation — but potentially a much larger one.

It can help creativity enormously.

But if you don’t control the machine, the machine can begin controlling you.

What we understand today about artificial intelligence is only the beginning.

That raises questions far beyond art.

What happens to employment?

What happens to medicine?

What happens to education?

What happens to human thought itself?

Smith: But humanity has been doing this forever.

We walked. Then we rode horses. Then we built trains, automobiles and airplanes.

Then came computers.

Every technology changes how human beings live.

The fascinating question is not simply what happens to this generation.

What will human society look like two generations from now?

David, what have you taken away from this conversation with a man whose life had moved from a Paris darkroom to kinetic art, New York galleries, Sept. 11, political activism and exhibitions around the world?

Smith: Ron and I have a commonality of interest.

We’re both creators.

Whether it’s business, art or whatever else, we create.

And people who create understand that dynamic.

I appreciate what Ron has created because I understand how he thinks.

He does it professionally. I’m fortunate enough to pursue much of my art as a passion.

But fundamentally, we’re doing the same thing.

We’re creating.

Ron, your final thought?

Agam: I think about my father.

Whenever I visited his museum, he would ask me, “Are people coming?”

And I would tell him, “Yes, Abba. They’re coming. Thousands of children come.”

Why did that matter so much to him?

Because my father had once been a young boy with almost nothing, standing near the sand and the ocean, watching movement and dreaming.

Out of that, he created something completely new.

That is what art can do.

Something begins inside one human mind and can continue affecting people generations later.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

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