The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own. I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before. In this thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is not affiliated with any company; I’m just featuring projects that I find. Please DO NOT send me your work. I do not take submissions.
Today’s featured artist: Kendrick Brinson Brinson/Banks
“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.
The first time I went to Sun City, Arizona was December 2009. I was a new freelancer after having left my last staff photojournalist job at a newspaper and I’d read about the age-restricted city of 40,000 retirees, and then read about the Sun City Poms, a cheerleading squad made up of women all the way in their 80s, and I read about the 50th anniversary of the place that would begin the next month, and I knew I had to go and take photos there. I never would have thought that December that I’d be returning with my camera for a decade, but I have.
For 60 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 was the first place of its kind and it is still the largest. The 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.
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 are 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.
People can see more my work here:
Yes, I do intend to make a book of the project I just have to decide when I’m done going 😂
To see more of this project, click here.
APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world. She has been involved in the photography and illustration industry since the mid 80s. After establishing the art buying department at The Martin Agency, then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies, she decided to be a consultant in 1999. She has a new Twitter feed with helpful marketing information because she believes that marketing should be driven by brand and not by specialty. Follow her at @SuzanneSease. Instagram
Success is more than a matter of your talent. It’s also a matter of doing a better job presenting it. And that is what I do with decades of agency and in-house experience.
