McVirn Etienne: What’s in a name?

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At one point my entire lighting repertoire consisted of a couple of reading lamps. That was before I moved up to a pair of really old Bowens 750s – which I bought for £50. They were brilliant.’

He thinks it was because his mother had to bear the brunt of extreme labour pains just before he was born – so the payback was his Christian name: McVirn.

“Well I’ve got a sister called Valerie and a brother called Mervyn – so there’s got to be some good reason that I ended up with McVirn” jokes the 46 year old London-based photographer – whose friends all call him ‘Mac’.

Big Mac (he’s also a karate brown belt) used to be a car cleaner at a Vauxhall dealership next to West Ham football stadium – but these days the only thing you’ll find him polishing will be a camera lens before a shoot.

Interestingly, it was a stunning-looking woman running topless along a Spanish beach with an Alsatian in tow that changed his life forever.

Explains Mac: “It was back in 1986 and I had decided to take my first ever summer holiday abroad. I wanted to shoot some film despite the fact that I knew very little about photography at the time.

A good friend lent me his Canon AE-1 Program, which at the time was one of the most popular amateur cameras ever brought to market. Of course, I had no clue how to use it so I picked up a copy of Practical Photography magazine and just read and re-read.
Then about ten weeks before the holiday I bought an additional lens, a tripod, a camera bag, various filters and a cable release.

When I got to Spain I just happened to be strolling along a beach when this beautiful woman jogged by with her dog. She was topless and as she ran past a large rock in the water the waves just crashed right behind. I got a great picture and that was it. I made up my mind right there and then that I was going to be a photographer.”

Mac managed to talk his way into a job as a junior at Metro Imaging in London. “I had to be a bit creative to get that job” he says. “I persuaded a friend who knew about printing techniques to provide me with a couple of prints that I passed off as my own. I guess it was cheating but I was really desperate to find a way into the business.”

He spent the next three years learning his trade. “I used to study photographers’ images and always tried to work out just how they achieved their results.”

But when it comes to image capture he is completely self-taught.
He holds no membership with any photo-organisation and doesn’t really have any special photographer mentors.

But Mac admits: “I am a bit of a control freak. I throw myself wholeheartedly into everything I do and I have to do it on my own. No one has put a stamp on me – and from a creative point of view I’d say that’s a good thing.”

He adds: “The most important thing I ever learnt as an assistant was how to run a business. How to market it.”

Mac’s first big break on the music photography side of his business came back in 1994 when a designer friend who was doing some work for a record company, asked him to help on a cover shot for the Jamiroquai album: “The return of the space cowboy”.

“He cut out a logo from a giant Rizla paper” recalls Mac. “And then we spread some cannabis in the middle to highlight the ‘spaced out’ theme.”

But as soon as the poster campaign hit the billboards there was uproar in The House of Commons.

“Kids had started stealing the posters from bus stops and MPs were very upset about the graphic display of this drug”, he adds. “The poster campaign eventually had to be reissued with a revised Photoshop’d version.”

But the notorious campaign helped put McVirn Etienne firmly on the ‘music shoot’ map.
“I followed up with Jamiroquai’s ‘Half the Man’ and some shots for my sister’s band.
Then I decided to go for it completely and went self-employed. I bought another Canon camera and a second-hand Bronica.”

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