(upbeat music) - My Great-Aunt Edith took a lot of photos, especially snapshots during her younger years in the 1920s and '30s.

But she wasn't just documenting her life.

She was sharing photos with the family she left behind in Belarus.

And after she died, we found photos sent to her by her sister and nieces, with inscriptions filled with longing for a reunion that would never happen.

It was photography that kept them connected.

In the next half hour, five stories about the power of photography.

These men called themselves railroad tramps.

Their images and stories were recorded by this young man on an epic adventure in the early '70s.

This photographer left behind half a million photos, including intimate images of Black Chicago.

Now, his daughters want to share them with the world.

A Chicago couple captures stunning images of the world's great hikes.

Then, grounded by COVID, they take a closer look at what Chicago has to offer.

This photographer is renowned for his photos of all the national parks.

When the Indiana Dunes made the list in 2019, he came to give it his unique treatment.

And the trendy River North area had a much grittier past.

A longtime Chicago photographer shares what he saw.

Stick around.

That's right now on "Jay's Chicago."

(bright music with whistling) Hi, I'm Jay Shefsky.

This first story is about an amazing adventure.

More than 40 years ago, a young man from Chicago traveled all over the country by freight train to meet and photograph men who called themselves railroad tramps.

(warm pensive music) - It's difficult to sleep on the floor of a box car.

Sometimes, I'd wake up in a totally different part of the box car where I fell asleep.

My name is Dale Wickum.

I'm a retired electrician, and at one time in my life, I did a photo documentary on railroad tramps.

(warm pensive music) - [Jay] Dale Wickum made three cross-country trips on freight trains to take these photos.

The first was in 1974.

- It took me all summer, I circled the country, and started meeting these fellas.

(mellow rock music) Some people didn't want me to take their photographs, and so I would honor that, but some were okay with it.

Everybody, during that era, called themselves a tramp.

Nobody used the word hobo.

Tramp had a lot of dignity attached to it.

It meant you were able to take care of yourself, and you know, you rode the rails, so.

- [Jay] Dale rode with them, and he lived with them.

At night, Dale would jot down whatever he could remember that they said that day.

- [Tramp] People, they see a tramp ridin' in a box car and they might think, "Man, that's the life, "goin' from town to town and seein' different places."

Looks so easy to 'em.

It ain't.

I go to sleep at night, and every so often, I'll lay there thinkin' if things were different, you know, if I had a wife and kids, how it'd be.

- There's a couple photographs of fellas who partnered up.

- [Tramp] It's good to have yourself a partner.

Less chance of somebody messin' with you if they know they gotta tangle with two guys instead of one.

A partner can come in handy, like when you goes into town for food, or somethin'.

One of yous can stay in the jungle and watch the gear.

- A jungle is just a place to camp.

At the end of a railroad yard, there might be a little path going through the weeds into some trees, and there's a little fire pit where tramps have been camping up, cooking up.

- [Jay] Dale had a partner for a while named Hippy John.

- Who was not a hippy.

I don't know how he got the name Hippy John.

But we'd become partners, and I wanted to break up with him.

It was like breaking up with a girlfriend.

You know, he said, "I thought we were partners."

And I said, "John, I have to photograph other fellas."

- [Jay] It's a dangerous life, Dale says.

Guys got injured or killed all the time just from the train cars, and they always had to worry about getting robbed.

- [Tramp] When it comes to thievin', most of it's done by guys who ain't on these rails permanent.

A tramp's got any sense he ain't gonna steal from another tramp.

A tramp spends the better part of his time on his rails, day and night, and he ain't gonna do nothin' where he has to worry about another tramp huntin' him down.

- [Jay] During all three trips, Dale's girlfriend Nancy, now his wife, was waiting for him in Chicago.

- I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard, 'cause I knew it was dangerous.

It would be months, sometimes, before I'd hear from him.

- [Jay] But she says she never tried to talk him out of it.

- No, never, never.

When you saw the quality of that first series of photographs, you go, "Oh, this is too good.

"Go for it, just be careful."

- [Jay] But when she picked him up at the end of a trip, the first encounter was memorable.

- Within 10 feet, the smell was just horrendous, and we burned the clothes.

- [Jay] After Dale got back from the third trip, a publisher was going to make a coffee table book, but the deal fell through and all of this was packed away in a trunk.

Now, the photos and stories are on a website, followingthetracks.com.

- [Dale] Most of the men are probably long gone, and I think the fellas were flattered that somebody would actually take an interest in them.

(pensive guitar music) (upbeat music) - It's always good news when a photographer's unknown work is discovered because it gives us a fresh look at ourselves.

This next story is about a Chicago photographer who left behind a huge body of work, most of which he never showed to anyone.

At a Green Line station on the west side of Chicago, riders are greeted by giant photos from a different time.

They were taken by photographer Dorrell Creightney, who worked in Chicago and Sweden from the 1960s through the '80s, and died in 2011.

But his work is not well known, and his daughters are on a mission to change that.

- My dad was a commercial photographer, like an advertising photographer, but he just had a camera with him wherever he went.

- [Jay] And they're discovering that he took a lot of photos.

Samantha Creightney and Vanessa Stokes estimate that their father left behind between 300,000 and 500,000 images.

- [Vanessa] Rolls of film.

- [Jay] Some of it was the work he did as a commercial photographer, fashion, advertising, corporate work.

The River North studio he opened in 1969 is believed to be the first in Chicago owned by a Black photographer.

- Some prints.

- He may have made his living doing commercial work, (pensive music) but his passion, it seems, was for people.

From people on the street to top musicians passing through town, Dorrell Creightney took a lot of photos purely as art, and he rarely showed them to anyone.

Now, his daughters and his widow face the daunting task of digging through so many negatives.

But that, they say, comes with the fun of discovery.

- Yeah, this is Nancy Wilson here.

- [Jay] And especially the thrill of finding his celebrity photos, like Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane.

- When he was alive, we found pictures of Miles Davis.

And he was like, "I don't even remember "taking pictures of Miles Davis.

"Well, if they're in there, I guess I took 'em," you know?

(women laughing) You know?

So yeah.

[Jay] Darrell Creighney was born in Jamaica and came to Chicago with his family in 1954 when he was 18.

He got interested in fashion photography first when he worked as a department store window dresser.

He lived in Sweden for a few years when he was single, and then again soon after he married Maxine.

- I think as an immigrant and coming from a colonial country, he just wanted to see the world and do things, really.

- [Jay] In Sweden, he shot some of his biggest celebrities.

- The one that particularly comes to mind is The Supremes.

♪ Baby, baby ♪ - They were in Stockholm for a few days.

He got in with the musicians, and that was how he was able to do a lot of, like, the backstage-type shooting.

♪ I've got this ♪ - It's a godsend when images like this show up that you didn't know even existed before.

- [Jay] Bob Black was a Chicago Sun-Times photographer from 1968 to 2006.

He never knew Dorrell Creightney, but agreed to look through some of his work.

- I think he had a very great eye, and he had a sense of timing, like the teenage girl that had her hand up to the face.

I'm sure that hand went up so fast.

So he caught the, well, what Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment.

He caught it.

- [Jay] Dorrell Creightney retired from photography in 1983.

He was still in his 50s, and some mysteries remain, like why he put it all behind him, and why he so rarely showed anyone his art photography.

- He never really talked about it, so when we started going through it with him when he was still here, it was a lot of contention with him.

- Because I think that he was reminded of what he didn't accomplish, like what he didn't do with it, you know?

- [Jay] By any measure, this is a huge project.

They know there may be monetary value in this archive, but they say that's not primarily what drives them.

- All this beauty that he left behind that, you know, is significant, especially for a Black man living in Chicago.

That's what drives me.

And he left this for us to do that.

- I like this one, though.

(upbeat music) - When the Indiana Dunes became a national park in 2019, one celebrated photographer knew that he had to come to the dunes as soon as possible.

The Indiana Dunes includes 15,000 acres of wetlands, prairie, rivers, forests, and of course, sand dunes.

And when the dunes became America's 61st national park, this man booked a flight.

His name is QT Luong.

- [QT] I was born in Paris, France, and then I came here to the US a quarter century ago, and that year, I began my project to photograph all the US national parks.

(mystical pensive music) - [Jay] Plenty of fine photographers have captured the wonders of the national parks, but QT Luong is the only one who has photographed every national park with a large format camera.

(mystical pensive music) - I was the first to photograph all the 58 national parks, and then all the 59, all the 60s, and so I wanted to try to keep that record.

(camera cliking) - [Jay] QT Luong is a scientist.

He began to visit the national parks when he came to the University of California at Berkeley.

He brought a standard 35-millimeter camera, but wasn't satisfied with the results.

Then, he saw the spectacular and iconic photos of Ansel Adams.

- [QT] The most beautiful prints I'd ever seen, and so I saw it was time to try to photograph with the same cameras as the masters.

(pensive music) The first time I took a picture with that camera, when I came home, I looked at the transparency and I could see more details in the transparency that I could see at the scene.

If I made a picture with this camera, I can really place the viewer at the scene because then he will be able to see as much as I saw, explore the scene for himself.

- [Jay] Luong doesn't just visit the easy national park views.

He must often travel for days.

To get these shots of the Arrigetch Peaks in Gates of the Arctic National Park required two commercial flights, a mail plane, and then a float plane.

- And from there, we backpacked for a couple of days to get to the base of the peak.

- [Jay] The Indiana Dunes' best views are quite accessible, and Luong says he was struck by the ecological diversity.

- [QT] You see forest and you see wetlands, and you have the dunes and you have the coast, so it's quite a bit going on in such a small park.

- [Jay] Each large format photo costs $10 for film and processing, so these days, QT Luong mostly uses a digital camera, which he says can now approach the level of detail that drew him to large format photography a quarter century ago.

But if a 62nd national park is created, QT Luong will be there with the camera he has now carried to 61 of them.

(pensive music) (upbeat music) The area in Chicago that we call River North now offers a trendy mix of restaurants, bars, and galleries, but it wasn't always that way.

In Chicago, photographer and filmmaker Tom Palazzolo lived there with his camera in its grittier days.

(bright mellow organ music) - [Tom] Walking around here now is very, very surreal.

Except for a few places, everything has changed.

Of course, it's been 50 years.

It was 1962 then, I think, that I moved there, taking a photo class, and looking for subject matter, and there it was, right outside the door.

- [Jay] Tom Palazzolo was 25 when he moved here.

He'd come to Chicago to study at the School of the Art Institute.

The apartment at Clark and Hubbard was cheap, but that wasn't all that drew him.

(whimsical jazz organ music) - [Tom] Clark Street was totally unique, just that stretch from the river, all the way to Chicago Avenue.

You know, it was colorful, I guess.

You know, it had lots of bars, almost every corner.

If it didn't have a greasy spoon, it had a bar.

There were at least two, maybe three, burlesque houses.

Right here was Moler Barber College.

I'd go in, get my haircuts for 50 cents.

There were about 10 barber students.

I knew them all and they were jokers and cut-ups, so to speak.

Was that a bad pun, a cut?

(groans) Abe Lincoln would come in every so often, he'd get a trim.

They said Abe was not a good tipper.

It was strange.

- [Jay] Tom was inspired by early photographers, like Lewis Hine.

- Photographs of people who, you know, low end of the economic scale.

I was interested in following that kind of tradition.

(whimsical jazz organ music) I got good feedback from the photographs in class.

Then I graduated in '65, and I continued to photograph, and even film the area a bit.

Lot of friends would take pictures of the Loop, and that never interested me, you know, at all.

(lively music) - [Jay] Tom Palazzolo went on to be known primarily as an experimental filmmaker, turning his lens on the grittier sides of Chicago.

(psychedelic rock guitar music) - [Announcer] Tom came to the Midwestern city of Chicago as a struggling art student.

- [Jay] And he was the subject of a film, which included his work along Clark Street.

- When you're in an area like that, people tend to be more open, you know?

If I went into the Loop and tried to shoot people, they would, God knows what, call the police, or something.

As you can see, some of the people were alcoholics.

It is part of the street, what the street was like.

This was a diner, it was an all-night diner, the only one I knew of that was open all night.

(mysterious pensive music) And I would go in there for coffee, and that's where I met Carol Ann, who sadly was dying of ALS, and only lived about a year after I got to meet her.

(whimsical jazz organ music) I felt like I was sort of privileged to be in that area, for some reason, privilege in that it offered me something expressive to work with.

It was a place that I could empathize with.

- [Jay] And now that this stretch of Clark Street is just another part of trendy River North, Tom Palazzolo's photos help us remember our past.

(upbeat music) Next, two photographers who have taken stunning images of the greatest hikes in the world.

During COVID, they and their cameras stayed closer to home.

Matt Sparapani and Alison Newberry weren't planning to be in Chicago in the summer of 2020.

- Yeah, yeah, I got- [Jay] But like many of us, these Chicago school teachers had to rethink their plans.

- Well, we usually have big summer plans.

Being teachers, you know, we have the summer off, and so this year, we were gonna go to Vancouver Island and do one of the classic hikes of the world, the West Coast Trail.

- And then do some more backpacking in the Western United States, in Idaho, and in the Wind River Range in Wyoming.

(bright lively music) - [Jay] For the last 12 years, Matt and Alison have used their summers off to take on some of the greatest hikes in the world.

And lucky for us, they're also both top-notch photographers.

(bright lively music) They've even written a book about it.

(playful pensive music) In 2020, however, they were forced by a pandemic to stay closer to home.

(camera shutter clicking) - [Matt] Ooh, there's a pink Fischer.

- [Alison] Sweet.

[Jay] And it's changed their opinion about what Chicago has to offer nature-wise.

- We used to kinda bemoan the fact that we lived in Chicago.

Like, we, you know, really lived for the summer when we could get away and go to these exotic places that were so beautiful.

- [Jay] But this year, they've had plenty of time to explore their own backyard.

All of these photos were taken in the Chicago area.

- Like everybody, we got a little stir-crazy and wanted to get outside, and thought, well, let's go to one of our local forest preserves.

(playful pensive music) - [Jay] But they didn't just go to one local forest preserve.

This year, Alison and Matt have visited more than 60 natural areas in the Chicago region, and they say they know they have just scratched the surface.

Today, they're at the Middlefork Savanna Forest Preserve in Lake County.

Most of their local photography is focused on wildlife, especially birds.

So far this year, 173 species.

But they're not going to pass up the non-avian critters that present themselves.

(cicadas chirping) While the Chicago area can't claim any mountains, or even many hills, Alison and Matt say they've come to love the wide variety of ecosystems, prairies, forests, wetlands, moraines, and it's not all about photography.

Sometimes, they do put their cameras back in the car.

- Usually, when we're deciding where to go, we try to pick a place where we, you know, hoping that we'll see birds in the morning, or in the late afternoon, and then we'll combine it with some other activity.

- We spent years lookin' all over the world for beauty and nature, and it turns out, it's right out your own backdoor.

(playful pensive music) - [Jay] And Matt and Alison have found that even if their destination is not grand and exotic, a walk, ride, or paddle in nature is not only a great way to be socially distant, it can also be a balm for a stressful time.

(playful pensive music) (upbeat music) You can watch any of these stories again, along with 15 years' worth of other stories, on our website, wttw.com/jayschicago.

And while you're there, tell us what you thought of the show.

I'm Jay Shefsky, thanks for watching.

(lively music with whistling)