In 1950, Chu Ming Silveira, not yet ten years old, boarded a ship from Hong Kong bound for Rio de Janeiro. Twenty-two years later, her most iconic creation—the Brazilian payphone—began appearing on the streets. In 2019, twenty-two years after her passing, a law was enacted in Brazil that removed the obligation for telephone operators to install and maintain public payphones.

    I began this project in March 2018, when numerous deactivated payphones (their metal supports still intact, as required) dotted the city of Belo Horizonte. The last photograph I took for this collection was in mid-2020; by then, all the payphones in the mosaic above—and many others—had been removed from the streets.