Chu Ming Silveira boarded a ship from Hong Kong to Rio de Janeiro in 1950.
Twenty-two years later, her most iconic creation—the Brazilian payphone—began appearing on the streets.

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In 2019, twenty-two years after her death, a law removed the requirement for telephone operators to install and maintain public payphones in Brazil.

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I began this project in March 2018, when numerous deactivated payphones—many reduced to their metal supports—still dotted the city of Belo Horizonte.

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The last photograph in this series was taken in mid-2020.
By then, all the payphones in the mosaic above—and many others—had been removed.