Advertising Space : illustrating the spatial impact of urban outdoor advertising

Abstract: Advertising is a phenomenon that shapes the image of many urban spaces today and has done so for the past two hundred years at least. Its impact has been described both academically and in the work of artists. In this paper I observe the impact of outdoor advertising on space through a series of photography walks. My own experience is reinforced by a short historical overview of the history of outdoor advertising since the 1800s, also chronicling the critique of outdoor advertising on urban space of the last decade. I then appropriate and analyse a selection of illustration methods that deal with outdoor advertising: Larissa Fassler's artwork Regent Street ⁄ Regent’s Park (Dickens thought it looked like a racetrack), City Wipeout by Pasi Kolhonen, DELETE! by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf, Hidden Town by Gregor Graf and They Live by John Carpenter. The appropriation of these methods implies that I reproduce them, applied on locations in Stockholm in Sweden, to get a deeper understanding of the processes used. This study shows that each of the studied methods supplies its own angle on the impact of outdoor advertising on urban space, sometimes complementary to the arguments found in the critique. This paper concludes with a discussion on the strengths of each of the illustration methods, with a focus on discussing the spatial impact. I show that the texts and images studied are tools that when used in conjunction with each other can cover more facets of how outdoor advertising impacts urban spaces.