Award-winning Jamaican photographer Howard Moo Young, died suddenly at his home on Wednesday.
Moo Young who had celebrated his 80th birthday in October, was found by the last of his five children, Alyssa, with whom he had been living for the past six years.
“It really was quite sudden. I mean, he was getting older, and he wasn’t as strong as he was before, but he didn’t have any chronic illnesses. He had a few minor problems, just getting up there in age, but nothing terminal. He was very lively, even up to the day before he was preparing to show at Liguanea Art Festival and getting ready for doing some new work. He had been doing a lot of new drawings recently and he was really excited to show his work again,” Alyssa said, adding that her father loved to walk.
“I would tell him ‘Daddy, you need to stop walking up and down on the road’, but he really loved to walk from our house down to Manor Park, which he did even up to last week,” she shared.
Moo Young had been a mainstay on the Jamaican art landscape for more than 50 years honing his craft as a photographer, sketch, and graphic artist or as a lecturer and mentor.
However, he was also very well-known as creative director of Moo Young Butler and Associates Ltd, one of the island’s top advertising agencies he co-founded with Radcliffe Butler.
Moo Young served as an advertising and design consultant to many companies, creating numerous corporate logos, including for Victoria Mutual Building Society, National Commercial Bank, Jamaica Money Market Brokers Ltd, HEART Trust/NTA, National Works Agency, Pan Caribbean Merchant Bank, Jamaica Stock Exchange, Unionbank, Quad Night Club, Christopher’s Jazz Café, Shields & Shields, and Eden Gardens.
A graduate of The School of Visual Arts, New York, in advertising and graphic design, Moo Young’s creative genius is most easily spotted in his breath-taking photography. He boasts an extensive body of work which have earned him numerous awards dating back to 1979 when he won the Commonwealth Photography Exhibition in Edmonton, Canada. He also captured many more accolades, among them the Centenary Medal for Photography from the Institute of Jamaica, Champion Photographer in the 1982 Jamaica Festival Photography Competition in which he won five Gold, five Silver, and seven bronze medals, as well as 22 awards of merit. He was also a 2008 recipient of the prestigious Silver Musgrave Medal for Photography and was inducted into the Caribbean Development for The Arts & Culture Foundation’s Hall of Fame for Photography in 2003.
He lectured graphic design production at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts for 25 years and mentored youth from Spanish Town and the rugged South Side community in Kingston in photography through the Grace and Staff Foundation.
His images have been published in Beautiful Jamaica, Insight Guide Jamaica, The JAMAICAN magazine, Skywritings, Marley Reggae King, Jamaica Observer, as well as in many advertisements, brochures, annual reports, and calendars over the years.
He was also a contributor to the Sunday Gleaner on photography and the arts.
