LOS ANGELES — When Eric Garcetti ran for mayor of Los Angeles, his campaign created an Instagram account to feed voters a daily stream of campaign pictures: candidate shaking hands, candidate touring park, candidate giving a speech. Unremarkable, unrevealing and uncontroversial — and destined to fade away with Election Day, which it did.  But about six months after taking office in June, Mr. Garcetti, who at 43 is the youngest mayor of Los Angeles in over 100 years, turned that account into a personal experiment in the use of social media by a new generation of officeholder. 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. Sometimes they are not great pictures: Like this, that was from my car. But I’ll take a situation and try to make it aesthetically pleasing.”  As a politician, Mr. Garcetti is at once amiable and ambitious. With his easy smile, attractive young family, firm command of Spanish and Rhodes scholar credentials, he is frequently mentioned as a candidate-in-waiting for governor. It does not hurt that he comes from a famous Los Angeles political family: His father, Gil Garcetti, was the district attorney who prosecuted O. J. Simpson.  With expectations like that, there has been some grumbling about the new mayor’s phlegmatic ways; Los Angeles Weekly wrote an article bemoaning his “slow start” and his search for an agenda. And while Mr. Garcetti has yet to match Mr. Villaraigosa’s ambitious out-of-the-gate pledges like taking over the school board — as the last mayor tried, without success — the new mayor dismisses suggestions that he may be a tad too laid back, calling them a premature verdict on a new way of doing business in City Hall.  “We’re about getting results, not getting headlines,” he proclaimed this month in his State of the City address.  By contrast, Mr. Garcetti’s plunge into a form of social media that is at once intimate and political — and relatively untested — is noteworthy at a time when elected leaders are struggling to find new ways to break through, particularly to younger voters. No matter that Mr. Garcetti has only about 3,300 subscribers on Instagram; presumably he is at the early stages of this road.  “The contrast between Mayor Garcetti and most everyone else is striking,” John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, said in an email. “Garcetti’s shows a portrait of LOS ANGELES. Both beautiful and brilliant in my opinion.”  In a follow-up interview, Mr. Della Volpe elaborated. “People are spending billions of dollars giving voters what they don’t want, which are tricky ads,” he said. “We spend no time giving voters what they do want, which is a truer connection with their government and opportunities to engage.”  There is a generational echo here: Mr. Garcetti’s father was also known for taking a camera with him on his travels as district attorney, and left politics to become a professional photographer. In an interview, he recalled having his son at his side at many government events.  The elder Mr. Garcetti also has an Instagram account, which he uses “hardly ever.”  Asked what he thought of his son’s work, he responded: “His photographer work, or his work as mayor?”  The Garcetti photographs, with the occasional exception, rise above the standard collections of selfies or ribbon-cutting photos that fill the Instagram accounts of so many elected officials, among them Mr. Garcetti’s official mayoral Instagram site, lamayorsoffice. There is the photo of a jogger midair, a silhouette caught against a sky colored by sunrise in Griffith Park; a close-up of an insect that Mr. Garcetti’s office identified as a crane fly, angular and utterly still against a wall at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; a view, from a distance, of the skyline of Los Angeles rising in a gray morning cover of fog.  Shortly after Mr. Garcetti visited a park in North Hollywood the other day, a photo showed up in his Instagram account of a lone tree, gnarled against the expanse of a blue sky.  “Compared to other politicians, he is less self-obsessed and does have an eye and feeling for the city he lives in,” said Edward Goldman, the art critic for KCRW, the public radio station here. He said that while much of Mr. Garcetti’s work was unremarkable, several pictures grabbed his attention, among them the jogger, the insect and one of an outdoor mural.  “What I like about these few photos by Eric is, they stop you for a moment, and make you aware how much surprise and even magic is around us at all times,” Mr. Goldman said. “But it takes a discerning eye to recognize and capture it.”  Artistically, however, Mr. Goldman suggested that Mr. Garcetti would be better served if he could “slow down and pay attention to detail rather than maniacally snapping photos.”  The mayor’s father offered a more benevolent assessment. “I get a kick out of looking at his photographs,” Gil Garcetti said. “He is a very good photographer. He sees things that other people look at but don’t see.”  A version of this article appears in print on April 28, 2014, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: A Young Mayor Who Likes to Share His View From the Top. 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Personal photographs taken by Mayor Eric Garcetti shed light on Los Angeles and new ways for politicians to use social media.