My Own Picture that "Lies"

The way I created my picture that "lies" (notice that lies is in quotation marks because this picture actually sends out a very important and TRUE message) was by getting a photograph of Barack Obama, one of Evo Morales (president of Bolivia), another one of  Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (president of Brazil) and finally one of Felipe Calderon (president of Mexico), cutting off the head of each president by using the magic extractor and pasting each head on top of the photograph of Mount Rushmore, which I got from Google images as well. After pasting each head on top of the Mount Rushmore photograph I did my best at adjusting the opacity, the brightness, and the contrast of each head in order for them to be somewhat blended into the picture. Below each head, I typed in the name of each country with the font color resembling one of the colors in the country's flag. Then, with a large font size, I typed in "American Presidents," using the colors of the 4 flags in order to decorate "American."
Many of you might not understand the point I am trying to make, but if you stop and think for a while you will understand the cultural and political aspect to this picture. The fact that citizens of the United States call themselves "Americans" causes discomfort for many people living in Central and South America. It might be true that citizens of the United States do not mean to cause any harm when they call their country America, but it is perfectly understandable why people living  in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Guatemala etc. might feel offended since they live in the Americas as well. A great example of this that angers many Mexicans is at the border, when the police officers ask people if they are American citizens. Technically, everybody could answer yes as long as they live in a country inside the Americas. To demonstrate this important message, I used the presidents from 4 different countries to represent the "Americans" living in each country.
I do not believe the manipulation is harmful since I am not necessarily attacking the U.S. citizens who refer to themselves as Americans, instead this is just of way to remind all those people that the United States is not the only country in the Americas. Now, I could have manipulated the picture so that it would cause harm to all the U.S. citizens (something I would never do by the way) just like in the article I read called "When Your Eyes Tell You Lies" where it explains how the Soviet Union in the 1950s, used manipulated photographs and propaganda in their favor. The objective was to convince the countries emerging in the war that the United States was strictly imperialist and racist.

Maier, Timothy. "When Your Eyes Tell You Lies." Insight on the News 16.38 (2000). Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Nov. 2010.