AUSTIN WEEKLY news
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Vol. 31 No. 1
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’Fences’ is worthwhile viewing
January 4, 2017
, PAGE 9
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Also serving Garfield Park
West Side d celebrates lb Kwanzaa, page 4-5
A rich photo archive could be headed to Austin
The children of late photographer Dorell Creightney, who lived in Austin, want his work displayed here By IGOR STUDENKOV Contributing Reporter
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hen photographer Dorell Creightney passed away in 2011, he left behind an archive of over 300,000 photographs. Since then, his family has been trying to catalog those images and figure out a way to make his work publicly available. And, if they have their way, it will be somewhere in Austin, the place where the photography lived during the latter years of his life. Creightney specialized in advertising photography, but most of the photographs in the archive were of street scenes, jazz musicians, portraits and nude photography. One of his daughters, Vanessa Stokes, said that the family hopes to do more than showcase the archive. They want to provide a venue for Austin artists — a cultural institution that the neighborhood could be proud of. Ultimately, they want to do their part to counter the negative images of the neighborhood that tend to appear in larger media outlets, and show that good things can happen in Austin, too. Creightney was born in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, in 1936. He and his family immigrated to Unied States in mid-1950s, moving to Chicago suburb of Harvey. He lived there until he got his own place in the Morgan Park neighborhood. At the time, he was working in a shopping mall in the south suburbs.
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A TREASURE TROVE OF IMAGES: The photos of the late photographer Dorell Creightney, who lived in Austin when he died in 2011, showcase a diverse range of black life both in Chicago and beyond. Creightney’s daughters want to establish a permanent home for their father’s work somewhere in Austin. See more photos on page 6 and at creightneyphoto.com/. The fashion photography in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and other fashion magazines inspired him to try his hand at photography. As the United States military ramped up its involvement in Vietnam, Creightney thought about ways to avoid the draft. He eventually moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where he had relatives. In Sweden, the budding
photographer’s career took off, culminating in a body of work that amounts to a Who’s Who of African American icons, including Jimi Hendrix, Diana Ross and the Supremes and Janis Joplin. “He was freelance photographer for about three or four years before he came back to states,” Stokes said. After his return, Creightney mar-
ried Stokes’ mother, Maxine. The couple then moved back to Sweden for a few more years before returning to Chicago for good in 1969. They settled in what is now known as Clybourn Corridor. While the neighborhood has since become a major North Side commercial hub, Stokes recalled that it was anything but that when she and her sister, Saman-
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tha Creightney, were growing up. “In that time, in the late 60s to early 70s, that area was pretty much a ghetto,” Stokes said. “It’s really interesting, because people think that Lincoln Park was a prominent area. And it’s actually what I would say Wicker Park used to be before See Dorell Creightney on page 6