Are we advertised to death?
A poster of Ali Khamenei, the spiritual leader of Iran, leads a row of posters of dead Hezbollah combatants in the southern Lebanese village of Yaater. (AFP/Ramzi Haidar)
With the back-and-forth sniping between Lebanon’s political parties this election season, it’s easy to feel that the Lebanese are coming under fire. Indeed, to anyone walking down the street, campaign billboards seem to form a seamless graphic representation of neighborhood power structure; row after row of Hezbollah campaign billboards along the airport road dissolve into Future Movement and Lebanese Forces posters, depending on whether they turn left or right.
Though it’s election season, public political imagery is anything but new in Lebanon. As is the case in other countries, public space in Lebanon is appropriated by various groups as they compete for the public’s attention, whether it is to convince you to buy a product, visit a restaurant, vote for a politician or remember the deceased. But few restrictions limit billboards in Lebanon, so advertisements for anything and everything frequently become overpowering along highways and other well-trafficked corridors.
Political billboards are particularly visible, but several scholarly works have recently begun to deeply examine the legacy they have in Lebanon. While many posters were removed in 2008 following the Doha Accord, election fever seems to be overpowering the spirit of reconciliation reached in Qatar last summer, and it is now difficult to tell that any removal effort ever occurred.
Upon arriving in Beirut six years ago, Paula Schmitt found its billboards “amusing” and “picturesque; a diversion in streets empty of public parks, benches or trees,” but over years spent living and reporting from Lebanon, Schmitt began to understand that the underlying purpose of Lebanese political billboards is to reinforce three “insidious” aspects of Lebanese political culture: “sectarianism, clientelism and the cult of personality.”
This is the thesis of Schmitt’s new book, Advertised to Death: Lebanese Poster Boys, released at Virgin Megastore in Beirut last Friday, in which she relates the development of her understanding of Lebanese political posters in a way that is quite understandable, if a bit unpolished, to those uninitiated into the complexities of Lebanon’s labyrinthine political environment.
The book is an academic-style study that manages to reveal the author’s frustration with the circularity and sectarian nature of Lebanon’s political arena; accordingly, Schmitt’s narrative is frequently punctuated by the use of the first person, so the book reads at times like a dissertation and at others like an opinion piece.
Schmitt, former Lebanon correspondent for Rolling Stone Brasil and Radio France Internationale, wrote the book as she completed her Master’s Degree in Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. She makes an academic analysis of the iconography of signage, analyzing poses, geometry, contents and spatial context in Lebanon’s many political billboards. As well as analyzing the traditional posters that grace the cities and villages of Lebanon, Schmitt traces the evolution of posters over the past few years, noting the increased attention paid to design and the movement away from kitsch toward hip. Advertised to Death is illustrated with over 100 photos so readers can examine the competing slogans, photoshop trickery and sectarian nature of the signs for themselves.
Schmidt spares neither side of the political spectrum in her critique, with analysis devoted to the Amal Movement’s Nabih Berri, Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah, the Hariri family, the Gemayel family, and even the all-too-memorable ski accident victim memorial posters that have been plastered around Gemmayzeh and Achrafieh for over a year.
But more attention is paid to the signage of Hezbollah and Amal, perhaps because religious and political billboards tend to be more concentrated in Shia areas, and she chronicles the effective image overhaul executed by Hezbollah following the 2006 July War, when the group began calling itself the Lebanese Resistance.
But iconography is not just the currency of Lebanese politicking. Many Middle Eastern countries have long venerated political and social leaders by iconifying them in posters and other signage. A visit to any residence in Jordan will likely reveal a prominently hung photograph of King Abdullah, and a host of glowering images of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad greets anyone who crosses the Lebanese border at Masnaa. Yasser Arafat’s visage still gazes from the narrow alleyways of Lebanon’s sprawling Palestinian refugee camps.
However, the book argues that in Lebanon, such posters are not an exception but the rule: “[B]illboards in Lebanon make one believe that constituents here tend to follow personalities, rather than ideas.”
And since it is election season in Lebanon, the old habits of ginning up support with billboards and posters are intensifying with each passing day. As we see with the current election cycle, posters related to particular candidates are not only divorced from any policy proposals, but even willing to veer into territory usually occupied only by personal care products, as was the case with the scandal-producing “Sois belle et vote” billboards.
In an interview with NOW, Schmitt said about today’s billboards: “I know political propaganda is supposed to be very reductive and simplistic, by definition, but in Lebanon they are exclusively so – there are no political proposals on the billboards.”
“The billboards … [are] the first thing we see and absorb and live with if we walk in the city,” Schmitt said. “What does that give me to see the face of Pierre Gemayel, or Hariri, or Nasrallah? How are we benefitting from that?”
Indeed, while this question has been asked before, perhaps it has not been asked enough. The book is interesting and timely, but it does not ask the question as well as it could. The author does not spend much time analyzing the posters of the March 14 coalition, leaving the impression that her study of Lebanon’s political posters is actually more of a work on Shia imagery. The book leaves the reader with questions, but it is at least a good first step toward illuminating the true cost and effect of posters on the contemporary Lebanese political scene.
Article originally published in NOW Lebanon on June 3, 2009.
