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Eric Garcetti's Instagram feed for April
Mayor Eric Garcetti's staff posts a lot of Facebook photos and Twitpics about the boss's week. Before he was elected, however, Garcetti himself was a busy tweeter and poster of photos: I picked up his shots of Scarlett Johansson in Hollywood and his panorama of the Stanley Cup in the City Council chambers, among his others. As mayor, Garcetti has continued to use a personal Instagram account for snippets of Los Angeles he observes from his inside-the-rope-line vantage point, or sometimes from his moving SUV as he's driven through the city. New York Times bureau chief Adam Nagourney takes notice in tomorrow's paper, saying that after being mayor for about six months, Garcetti "turned that account into a personal experiment in the use of social media by a new generation of officeholder." He notes that the mayor's father, Gil Garcetti, moved into photography after leaving office.
From Nagourney's story, which also serves as kind of an early one-year report card:
He has since posted a torrent of photographs — many of them artistically ambitious, and by any measure politically unconventional — that offer a textured and off-kilter view of Los Angeles.
The little-known photo feed is akin to a private diary or a sketchbook, the kind of document that once upon a time might not have been discovered for 50 years, hidden away on a shelf somewhere.Mr. Garcetti’s endeavor is at once political and personal, offering a glimpse into the subdued and slightly offbeat style that has come to define this city’s new leader. It is a style that, with every passing day, offers more of a head-snapping contrast to the splashy and showy ways of his immediate predecessor, Antonio R. Villaraigosa. The days of red carpet appearances, brash promises and bad-boy mayoral antics have given way to a mayor who grows animated talking about the pressing need for navigational systems on fire trucks — and who likes taking pictures with his Samsung Galaxy S4 phone from the behind-the-security-line vantage point that comes with his job....
No grip-and-grins or photos from last night’s Chamber of Commerce dinner here. The mayor shoots photographs from his moving car, while wearing a hard hat during a tour of a construction site, on his morning hike in Griffith Park, during a drive down the coast and from the mayoral car in the funeral procession for a police officer who was killed on duty. After introducing Charlie Wilson, the R & B singer, at a concert at the Nokia Theater, Mr. Garcetti slipped to the wings to watch the show — and to take photographs of Mr. Wilson from behind, washed in red light.
“I find myself in these unique places with a unique angle that nobody else can get to,” Mr. Garcetti said as he offered a personally curated tour of his work, displaying his phone while sitting on a wall by a North Hollywood subway station. “I’m looking for something that moves my eye."
Early in April Garcetti walked to work down Wilshire Boulevard and posted a series of shots. Here are three.
The Stiles O. Clements-designed Pellissier Building at Western Avenue that houses the Wiltern Theatre.
The Jaime Escalante mural at Alvarado Street.
Good Sam, where Garcetti was born.
