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Space and Culture
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DOI: 10.1177/1206331211412278
2011 14: 356 originally published online 19 September 2011Space and Culture
Anne M. Cronin
Researching Urban Space, Reflecting on Advertising : A Photo Essay
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Space and Culture
14(4) 356­–366
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DOI: 10.1177/1206331211412278
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412278SACXXX10.1177/1206331211412278CroninSpace and Culture
1
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Corresponding Author:
Anne M. Cronin, Sociology Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YT, UK
Email: a.cronin@lancaster.ac.uk
Researching Urban Space,
Reflecting on Advertising: 
A Photo Essay
Anne M. Cronin1
Abstract
This photo essay places into dialogue practices of photographing urban space and the market
research practices of the U.K. outdoor advertising industry. It explores photography as a method
for accessing understandings of cities, and it examines ways of analyzing the interplay between
photographic practices and data gathered through ethnography.Through personal reflections on
the research process,the essay considers the spatial practices of the outdoor advertising industry
and how its billboards and panels act to space out cities and city imaginaries.
Keywords
advertising, photography, cities, urban space, method, market research, experience
How we see city spaces—and how this shapes understandings of those spaces—has long been the
focus of academic research. But commerce’s interest in people’s visual experience of the urban
environment is equally intense. The project described here analyzed the practices of the U.K.
outdoor advertising industry and the visual impact of advertising on urban spaces.1
In the process,
I recognized the interweaving of commercial understandings with the phenomenological
experience of researching cities through the lens of a camera.
The text and images below are in dialogue. Their juxtapositions aim to explore how my experience
of researching urban space through the camera was a process, a process set out here as a
form of narrative. My photographic practices came to be folded together with my understandings
of how the industry researches and sells urban spaces. This is a reflection on method and on ways
of seeing that is inevitably personal and situated. But it also speaks to the framing of urban experience
as commercial with all the complexities and hesitations that this implies.
My camera pulls me into places. It sharpens my sense of urban temporalities, framing the
rhythms of building and unbuilding in Manchester’s center. This is capital on the march, and nothing
new (see Figures 1 and 2).
In the mid-19th century, Friedrich Engels (1845/1982) wrote of Manchester as the center of
the industrial revolution, a city crammed with immense warehouses, factories, gin palaces,
hotels, beerhouses, shops, and slums. He described the building processes and layout of the city
as having no apparent logic, while managing to hide the shockingly dilapidated working-class
areas from the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie.
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Figure 1. Building Manchester
I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working-class from the thoroughfares,
so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and nerves of the bourgeoisie,
as in Manchester. And yet, in other respects, Manchester is less built according to
a plan, after official regulations, is more an outgrowth of accident, than any other city.
(Engels, 1845/1982, p. 80)
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358		 Space and Culture 14(4)
Today this is the entrepreneurial city, building on credit and constantly shifting. It’s the neoliberal
backdrop against which the advertising industry operates. I wonder what it reveals and
what it conceals.
Figure 2. Site acquired by
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Cronin	 359
Setting off with my camera, I aim to document advertising in the outdoor spaces of Manchester:
billboards alongside arterial roads, panels in pedestrian zones, “mega wraps” on scaffolding. I
intend to plot out these spaces through photographs—this here; that there. I imagine that this will
be a useful mapping of location and type of advertising structure that will complement the ethnographic
data I have already gathered from media-owning companies.
I should be focusing on advertising. But as I walk, photograph, and map, I become aware that
I am learning to see other spaces. The camera as technology of knowing has been much discussed,
as have photographs’ temporal and spatial qualities. In her work on cities, Liggett (2003, p. xiv)
remarks that photographs and text combine to produce “cultural spaces,” and the making of images
bears witness not only to the city but to people’s role as producers of space. And Edensor (2005,
p. 15) uses his camera to examine the “sensual immanence” of the experience of moving through
urban spaces. Although I know the theories, I’m still surprised by my own practice and by what
I see while I should be focusing on billboards. The practice of photographing these commercial,
officially sanctioned structures and sites seems to license me to see other spaces. Flicking
through them later, these other photos seem to comment on my own, shifting ways of seeing.
The photos seem to present a kind of research diary—unintended, yet detailed and suggestive—
and to offer a methodological commentary on seeing, knowing, and researching with a camera.
Some appear to be questions about how I am seeing urban spaces and about what can be seen
(see Figure 3).
Some of these “seen spaces” are city-specific. I see Manchester’s music scene in ‘album
covers’ shots I take. I don’t know if the composition is remembered or imagined, but it seems to
capture my impression of Manchester in the 1980s and early 1990s (see Figure 4).
Figure 3. Seeing through spaces
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360		 Space and Culture 14(4)
I’m seeing these framed perceptions and urban processes because the ads I should be focusing on
can’t be separated from their material surroundings or from my academic and cultural knowledge of
them. But “context” hardly seems to cover it. I see conversations between ad texts, ad structures
such as billboards, and the textures of city spaces (see Figures 5 and 6).
And I become aware that I’m seeing these conversations through a back catalogue of urban
writers. Walter Benjamin’s seductive aphorisms sit comfortably alongside the ads’snappy straplines.
But for him, the ads’ true significance was not to be found in their signs and text; instead,
it lay in “the fiery pool reflecting in the asphalt” (Benjamin, 1979, p. 90).
If not their textual messages, then, what of the ads’ physical form? The heft and solidity of
industrial architectural heritage sits alongside the more flimsy ad panels—wooden structures showing
their disintegration, the ads on their street-facing planes changing constantly (see Figure 7).
I learnt in my ethnographic work how media-owning companies research urban space and
people, counting numbers of “hits” an advert may achieve. I start seeing urban spaces in ways
framed by the industry’s own practices—how many cars pass this site in an hour? Calculated as
“eyes on panel,” quantification is the currency of the industry. Their research practices identify
which spaces offer most visual impact, which routes offer up the richest consumers. The industry
learns to see urban spaces as moments of visual contact between the consumer and an advert. I
notice that the interview, observation, and documentary data I gathered in the industry are now
informing my photos. I’m seeing commercially; the metrics of the industry research practices are
in dialogue with my photographic practices.
Figure 4. Manchester as album cover
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Figure 5. Railing
Figure 6. Texture
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Figure 7. Structure and form
The industry attempts many dialogues. It asks questions of people moving around urban space
and sells the answers to companies buying advertising space on billboards and panels.
Thinking of all the places you see advertising outdoors, can you tell me in general how
often you notice the following?
Banners on buildings/scaffolding
Billboards/large roadside posters
Small posters on bus shelters and on the street
Posters on the outside of buses
Posters on the inside of buses
Posters on the outside of taxis
Posters on the inside of taxis
Posters in the underground and on the tube
Posters at railways stations
Posters outside supermarkets
Posters in leisure centers/gyms
Posters in pubs/bars
Posters in cinema foyers
Posters in airports2
The industry’s capacity to classify and tabulate is striking. Perec (1999) wonders at how “there
is something at once uplifting and terrifying about the idea that nothing in the world is so unique
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that it can’t be entered on a list” (p. 198). This listing and calculation creates a strange geography
that’s not about unique topographical features but the gathering and selling of data (“eyes on
panel”) that might persuade potential clients to advertise. We “editorialize” spaces, industry
practitioners tell me. We tell stories about numbers of potential consumers, potential sales, linked
to people’s movements past ad panels that they may not even notice.
But the industry also considers feelings, thoughts, and habits.
How did you feel between 6.30 a.m. and 7 a.m.?
Mood scale on a slider:
Bad mood ← ……………. → Good mood3
It makes promises to companies who might advertise on its billboards. And these companies
want such reassurances. Selling is so unpredictable, consumers so flighty.
National tracking across the major U.K. conurbations
Get under the skin of a key audience living and travelling around the capital
Unveil a typical day in the life and week in the life of a “typical” family
Provides statistical data to justify recommendations
The car has replaced the lounge as the new venue for family interaction
ROADS’ Town Optimiser allows us to drill down to town level to establish optimum
weights at a local level
Normative data are available4
Is this evidence of advertising’s power and reach? Certainly, advertising wants to sell. But its
success is hard to evaluate and the industry knows it. Numbers of eyes on panel don’t translate
directly into sales. Adverts may seem to be ubiquitous, but “ad avoidance” is a recognized trait
of the (recalcitrant) consumer. Unofficial ads pop up everywhere like weeds. I photograph these
nonindustry ads too (see Figure 8).
Billposters may well be prosecuted, but first you have to catch them. Many have helped us
think about how spaces slip away from the regulatory impulse, offering counternormative possibilities.
Resistance can piggy-back on corporate power, and the everydayness of urban space
can trump commercial intentions (see Figure 9).
Advertising’s power may well lie elsewhere. I notice that the industry’s research practices
relentlessly produce more and more figures, more claims, and new angles to speak to consumers.
These circulate, attempt to persuade potential clients, compete with rival media companies, and are
recycled. But margins are tight, campaigns fail, and ads are often unnoticed. What are the effects of
all this data production? Thrift (2006) argues that the metrics produced by practices of measuring
and calculating may not be the enemy of creativity, evacuating life; they may be viewed “as simply
other ways of spacing out the world” and may add “fertile sources of conflict” (p. 140).
Commercial calculation, commercial intention, and the resistances they shape have long been
in articulation. But I also notice that they influence how I see spaces with my camera. More specifically,
they inform how I ask questions of space with my camera. I think this is one of the
ambiguous powers of the advertising industry and its products: the capacity to open up questions
about our lives, social practices, and social ideals. The outdoor industry and its billboards throw
into play questions about how we live spatially, what cities are to us (see Figure 10).
These questions are folded back into the practices of the industry and have material effects—
they influence where billboards are placed, what product type is advertised, where and at what
time of day. They become part of the making of places. This is the “throwntogetherness” of
places that Massey (2005, p. 140) describes as a negotiation of a here-and-now, a negotiation that
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Figure 8. Billposters will be prosecuted
includes humans and nonhumans. The industry’s interest in people’s phenomenological experience
of cities (suitably quantified) takes material, spatialized form in its billboards and panels. In
this abstracted form, people have become indirect and perhaps unwilling participants in making
commercial places.
Like Liggett (2003), I bear witness with my camera to these places and to people’s role as
producers of space. But here, people’s role in the production of spaces is formed through the
industry’s practices of calculation and materialization. My photographic practices make this
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Figure 9. Scrap cars wanted
Figure 10. Throwntogetherness
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manifest for me in ways that are more than visual. Reflecting on the photographs—as an oblique
sort of research diary—I realize that my experience of seeing the spaces was shaped by what I
knew of the industry’s practices, but also that the process of taking photos shaped my own analysis
of the industry and urban spaces.
How, then, to think about outdoor advertising? Its panels, practices, and ads can ask questions
about what cities are to us and how we space out the world. And when such questions are asked,
they can open up the field of possibilities in unexpected ways—indeed, in ways that may run counter
to commercial intentions. They may create other ways of seeing.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article:
The research was funded by an ESRC grant (RES 000221744).
Note
1.	 For a full account of the project, see Cronin (2008, 2010). The project involved interviews with practitioners
in a range of media-owning companies, media agencies, specialist poster agencies, trade associations,
research companies, and one client company. From these companies, I collected data such as client
briefs, research questionnaires, research project results, and PowerPoint presentations. The project also
involved ethnographic work at one media owner’s office including observation of directors’ meetings,
brainstorming and creative sessions, construction and presentations of pitches, visits to clients and media
agencies, staff training, and a range of in-depth interviews with staff. The second part of the project
involved a case study of the visual impact of outdoor advertising in Manchester.
2. 	Excerpt from market research report on consumers and city space commissioned by a media-owning company.
3.	 Excerpt from research diary used by market researchers for the outdoor advertising industry.
4.	 Composite of promotional materials produced by media-owning companies.
References
Benjamin, W. (1979). One way street and other writings. London, England: Verso.
Cronin, A. M. (2008). Gender in the making of commercial worlds: Creativity, vitalism and the practices of
marketing. Feminist Theory, 9, 293-312.
Cronin,A. M. (2010). Advertising, commercial spaces and the urban. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Edensor, T. (2005). Industrial ruins: Space, aesthetics and materiality. Oxford, England: Berg.
Engels, F. (1982). The condition of the working class in England. London, England: Granada. (Original
work published 1845)
Liggett, H. (2003). Urban encounters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Massey, D. (2005). For space. London, England: SAGE.
Perec, G. (1999). Species of spaces and other pieces (J. Sturrock, Trans.). London, England: Penguin.
Thrift, N. (2006). Space. Theory, Culture & Society, 23,139-146.
Bio
Anne M. Cronin is a senior lecturer in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, U.K. She has
published Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban (2010), Consuming the Entrepreneurial City
(coeditor K. Hetherington; 2008), Advertising Myths (2004), Advertising and Consumer Citizenship (2000),
and a special issue of Feminist Review on “Urban Spaces” (2010, Vol. 96, No. 1; coeditor E. Oakley-Brown).
She is currently working on a project on friendship and urbanism.
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