Power, Paper, and Profit: Street Posters and the Making of Urban Visual Culture

Street posters are a prominent visual feature of urban environments alongside graffiti, commercial signs, and other public notices. This article explores the world of commercial street postering in Melbourne, Australia, examining posters not only as advertising media but also as semiotic agents and objects of urban governance. Drawing on ethnographic research with Melbourne’s four main poster companies, including interviews, field observations, and visual documentation, we investigate how posters occupy, maintain, and transform the surfaces of the city. We situate our study within broader histories of outdoor advertising and develop a methodological approach grounded in surface semiotics, a framework that emphasizes the material, spatial, and regulatory dimensions of urban signs and surfaces. Our analysis traces how poster companies navigate ambiguous regulatory environments, deploy digital data technologies while working with analog materials, and negotiate legitimacy through maintaining visual order in the city. This article positions street posters as sophisticated spatial agents that challenge simplistic associations with commercial outdoor advertising while revealing power hierarchies in the governance of urban images.