NORTHAMPTON — The mail carrier walked his usual route along Main Street, downtown, and then across the Pleasant Street intersection, where he’d been planning to shoot a video.
He sauntered past Urban Outfitters, where a girl he knows from Instagram works, and later into 16 Center St., where he has taken photos from atop the five-story spiral staircase and its fire escape.
On the second floor, he exchanged pleasantries with a man entering one of the building’s offices.
“He actually just followed me,” the mail carrier said, of one of his latest online followers.
Jeff Kelley knows these streets and buildings well. He walks them nearly every day as he delivers mail, a job he has had for more than 17 years. He captures them with his iPhone camera, and his images have brought him a degree of fame, including an interview in The Boston Globe this month about his Instagram page, which has more than 6,000 followers.
Some know him better by the name postaljeff.
Since joining Instagram in 2011, Kelley, who is 41 and lives in Easthampton, has posted more than 1,700 photos. His early work was marked by heavy editing and photo manipulation, but he has gone through several phases since. Much of his recent work borders on magical realism: two boys running atop the edge of a shadow, a rotary phone dangling from a tree, a man — himself — dissolving into air as fireworks burst behind him.
But Kelley said he finds it hard to settle on one style or aesthetic. When he tries, he gets restless after a few posts. Across styles, though, he believes his photos share an element of mystery or wonder.
“I’m not sure what that comes from,” Kelley said. “I’m walking around imagining ideas for a photo. When you try to compose from something that started in your head, there’s an element of dreaminess.”
For Kelley, it connects to an effort to see familiar things in new ways, and part of his inspiration comes from his route, he said. Main Street is static in some ways but ever-changing in others, like the people who walk along it. Kelley is not supposed to use his phone while he works, so he carries a notebook and jots down ideas when something catches his eye. He has started getting up earlier so he can work on projects before work. He edits and posts photos on his lunch break.
Pushing himself to capture things in unusual ways also helps him stand out on Instagram, he said.
“You’re just inundated with images,” he said. “How many people take pictures of a sunset? It became a challenge: How can I make a mark with an image?”
Like the platform where Kelley shares his photos, his editing process is distinctly 21st century, and it also connects his earliest and latest works. He has started to shoot on a DSLR and a film camera in addition to his iPhone 6, but eschews software like Photoshop and tweaks his photos exclusively on his iPhone.
It is how Kelley has always edited photos, because before Instagram, he had no photography background. Kelley’s brother is a photographer, as was his grandfather, and he has a background in the arts. He studied for two and a half years at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, but he had never been that interested in photography until he downloaded the Instagram app.
Five years later, Kelley has a dedicated online following. His posts get hundreds of likes and dozens of comments. His children, ages 8, 12 and 13, are fascinated with photography and he has managed to sell some work. Kelley has also found himself part of a worldwide community of active Instagram users, which he said has been what has kept him coming back to the app.
“If people weren’t commenting and interacting, I probably would’ve left a long time ago,” he said.
Kelley runs a second Instagram account, IGers413, which features work from photographers in the Instagram community in western Massachusetts. He has organized about a dozen meetings in the past few years, where these photographers can shoot and showcase their work.
Usually, about a dozen people show up, though more than 30 people came to a recent meeting in West Stockbridge where National Geographic photographer John Stanmeyer spoke. Kelley said he wants to meet at least one new person at every session, and so far, he has achieved that goal.
“Bring whatever camera you have,” he said, adding that people of all skill levels are welcome. “You’re not going to be looked down upon.”
Kelley still Instagrams at a high rate. He rarely misses more than a couple of days between posts. He’s working on promoting himself more, he said, and he has started to embrace the tag “photographer,” which he has been hesitant to do. What’s more, people have started telling him he’s famous.
“If you say so,” he replies.