This week Lenscratch is looking at some of the top 50 portfolios from Critical Mass….

Kendrick Brinson’s series, Sun City, takes a look at what our parents or grandparents are up to when we are not looking. At it appears that they are having fun and making making the most of their golden years in a closed-gate culture of golf carts and lawn bowling.

Kendrick is a photographer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. She worked full-time as an intern and a staff photographer for newspapers for three and a half years after receiving a journalism degree from the University of Georgia in 2005. In 2009, she left the world of being a staff photographer to pursue personal projects and to work full-time with LUCEO Images. Her current photographic interests include exploring the Deep South as well as aging in the retirement paradise of Sun City, Arizona in its 50th anniversary year. Her clients include Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Atlanta Magazine, New Scientist, US News & World Report, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times, among others. Her images have appeared on The Today Show, ABC News, in People Magazine, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Washington Times, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette and more.

Life After Life “I call this community: “Life after Life”. There are people well into 80’s and 90’s enjoying their life as if they were 50’s and 60’s. You can actually look forward to growing old. There is a lot to do. A reason to live,” said Vera MacIntosh, on a Sun City blog. For 50 years, those 55 and older have relocated to Sun City, Arizona, a city self-governed, a city unlike any other in the world. Sun City is 14 square miles of a retirement paradise of palm tree lined streets, each with a golf cart lane.

Sun City provides seniors with a life after work and a life after raising children. Sun City is a life of enjoying friends and being active, in spite of age. Why is this important? The National Institute of Health predicts that within 10 years, for the first time in human history there will be more people aged 65 and older than children under 5 in the world The average age in Sun City is 73. The community boasts eleven golf courses, seven recreation centers, seven swimming pools, three country clubs, 16 shopping centers and two libraries; the 42,500 residents have a lot to keep busy. There are more than 100 active clubs in Sun City and the days are filled with lawn bowling and group swim classes and the nights are filled with dancing.

All this living comes with loss, however. Friends and spouses die, and the singles dance night is just as full as the couples dance night for obvious reasons. Yet, there’s optimism everywhere. “Enjoy your youth, I’ll tell ya, you never know how much you have left,” resident Tom Woods told me.