Seattle Channel focuses on photographer Isaac Layman

The Seattle Channel's "Art Zone in Studio with Nancy Guppy" highlights the work of a most unusual Seattle photographer at 8 p.m. Thursday. Isaac Layman's large-scale photos are humble in subject matter but bright and hyperfocused, thanks to his painstaking methods.

Layman spends two to three hours accumulating digital images of, say, his kitchen sink — taking a photograph, moving the camera slightly, taking another photograph. He needs 10 to 20 images — shot from minutely different viewpoints and at different depths of field — to serve as fodder for his end product. Then he puzzles the layers of imagery together on his computer.

"When an area of a photograph has content that I want, in focus and at many different depths, I stack those images up and then systematically erase the parts that are out of focus," he says. "A strange thing happens, then, as your eye wanders through the image — you're seeing things newly in focus that would not have been from a single perspective."

The result is a high-definition take on common household sights. Layman, winner of the Seattle Art Museum's 2008 Betty Bowen Award, notes that while his images are superficially "icy-cold and clear," what they show is "grungy and human": a liquor-bottle-strewn workbench, a grimy electric-stove top.

"I've never photographed my sink empty," he quips. "It's always been with a pile of dirty dishes or food scraps. But there's that moment where, before I go to clean it up, it just looks like a beautiful still-life."

The result of Layman's patient palimpsest methods: everyday objects that manage to be "interesting in the face of being ordinary," as he puts it. His work is on display at Seattle Art Museum and the Henry Gallery, and can be viewed on request at Lawrimore Project (www.lawrimoreproject.com).

Michael Upchurch,

Seattle Times arts writer: mupchurch@seattletimes.com