Back before there were smartphones and tablets to keep kids dazed and preoccupied, we had very little forms of entertainment when accompanying our parents in their trips to the world outside.
On the rare occasion that we’d actually have fun, those usually involved kiddy rides. Literally, they were cheap thrills — costing just 20 cents for a short ride that’d last a couple of minutes at best. But boy oh boy, for that brief moment, ’twas a wonderful experience fueled by our imaginations, young impressionable minds and a mere 20 cents.
Alas, the world moved on and kids became no longer impressed by the kiddy rides in the presence of portable supercomputers capable of accessing all the entertainment in the world through taps and finger gestures. But professional lensman Nicky Loh did not forget how much fun he had on the coin-operated amusement machines.
After hunting down the man responsible for bringing the rides to Singapore and the region — Lee Kim Leng of Woo Hock Trading Co. — Loh carried out a nostalgia-driven project: A still life photography series focusing on the machines.
Take a ride through memory lane in Loh’s documentation of happier chapters of our childhood in his photo gallery:
