It was while watching the movie The Savages in 2009 that photographer Kendrick Brinson caught her first glimpse of Sun City, Arizona, a sprawling retirement community northwest of Phoenix. The film scene—with bright desert light, cacti, golf carts, and tidy rows of ranch-style homes—“had this really strange, very visually interesting look to it,” she says.
Since then, Brinson, 40, has gone every year to photograph Sun City’s residents, some of whom have become her close friends. Observing the enthusiasm people have for the many activities there, the self-described perfectionist says she learned something about herself: “I realized that I don’t have to be great, or even good, at something. I can just like the way it feels.” She’s taken up hobbies such as watercolor painting.
Opened in 1960, Sun City bills itself as the Original Fun City, designed for residents 55 and older. While retirement communities have proliferated across the country to cater to growing numbers of graying baby boomers, Sun City remains one of the largest. Its 14 square miles of palm tree–lined streets feature eight golf courses, eight recreation centers with seven aquatic facilities, multiple strip malls, two libraries, a hospital, and one cemetery.
The average age of the nearly 40,000 residents is 73. Sun City has been overwhelmingly white, but Brinson says the community is starting to focus more on diversity and inclusiveness and now has an LGBT club. On each visit, she finds herself reenergized. “It’s this purposeful learning, socializing, playfulness that I find super fascinating,” she says.
As with any group of aging people, loss is very much a part of life at Sun City; some of Brinson’s friends have passed away. But residents say they don’t dwell on death. “This is not God’s waiting room,” one told her. “Everyone is active and doing something.”
