Between the 1960s and the mid-1980s photojournalist Dorrell Creightney made pictures of Chicago street scenes, products for ads, beautiful models, everyday people, and musicians including jazz legends John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie.
He left behind between 300,000 and 500,000 images of his work.
Even Creightney’s daughter Vanessa says, “He was kind of a recluse.”
Among the stockpiles are photos of Aretha Franklin in concert in Stockholm and negatives of the English model Twiggy. There are pictures of Oscar Brown Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Marley at the Uptown Theatre. The daughters have been told there are pictures of Muddy Waters, but they have yet to discover those.
At the time Webb was shooting for the agency Photography Unlimited, owned by former Chicago Bears running back Don Shy. “Suddenly the place turned into a party joint,” Webb says. “The Bulls on Thursday night, the Bears on Friday night.” So he quit Photography Unlimited and went to work for Dorrell, who ran a more professional operation.
Now Creightney’s daughters are slowly returning their father’s work to Chicago’s streets. Seventeen of their father’s pictures of African-American life in Chicago were installed late last year at the Austin and Central stops on the CTA Green Line and at the Kinzie/Laramie stop on the Union Pacific West Metra Line viaduct. Local artist and designer Keith Brownlee custom-framed the eight-feet-by-five-feet images and designed the layout. And in conjunction with the Chicago Park District, neighborhood youth will be curating a show of Creightney’s work for an exhibit slated to go up in October at the Austin Town Hall, 5610 W. Lake.
