Alexis Hunter has ten seconds to get your attention

A lot can happen in ten seconds. First impressions are made, fights can break out, blood can be shed. For photographer Alexis Hunter, ten seconds was all she needed to get your attention. Best known for her narrative photo sequences made in the 1970s, Hunter grappled with subjects of desire, exploitation, authority and violence, storyboarding her interventions with mechanical tools, weapons and artefacts associated with femininity and domesticity.

In a new exhibition of her work, ‘10 Seconds’ at Richard Saltoun gallery, Hunter’s photographic platters serve up scenes of bloodied manicured hands, bulging crotches, flaming high-heels and hammer-yielding destruction. Collages of political news clippings and makeup adverts are vandalised with cursive writing. Deceive, seduce, expose, deface: these are the words of an artist working radically to poke and dissect the psychology of the patriarchy, capitalism and mass media with razor-sharp humour and curiosity.

‘10 Seconds’ compliments Hunter’s presence in Tate Britain’s ‘Women in Revolt!: Art, Activism and the Women’s movement in the UK 1970–1990.’ Curated by Natasha Hoare, senior curator at Goldsmiths CCA, the Richard Saltoun exhibition is the most extensive display of Hunter’s work since ‘Sexual Warfare’ at Goldsmiths CCA in 2018.

Born in New Zealand, Hunter produced an impressive body of work in feminist photography throughout the 1970s. After moving to London to join her sister, she became involved with the Artists Union Women’s Workshop and the Woman’s Free Arts Alliance. Adopting the ten-second rule in advertising (the time an advert has to win over the consumer’s attention), Hunter orchestrated the narratives in her staged photographs to unravel over a minimum of ten seconds. Composed of a sequence of grids, each image leads from action to action, drawing from the medium of film and striking with the immediacy that Hunter believed only photography to be capable of.

Creating a visual language that would be understood by those outside the male-dominated art world was vital. Whereas Nan Goldin preserves moments of intimacy, Diane Arbus captured stark portraits of people across the social spectrum, Hunter used images of her own hands as symbols of advertising, reclaiming and recontextualising the instruments used for selling and seduction. In her Approach to Fear series (1976-77), Hunter directly calls out the harmful commercial language of magazines and advertising and their influence in propagating gender norms. The series features manicured hands performing disturbing actions that shake up gendered expectations, like removing nail polish with a razorblade (Approach to Fear II: Change Decisive Action), setting a high heel shoe on fire (Approach to Fear XIII: Pain – Destruction of Cause) and smashing a wall with a hammer (Approach to Fear XX: Rape – Violence). Lured into the frame by hands that could mirror our own, we’re now incriminated in the scene.

I was lucky enough to walk through the gallery with Alexis’ sister, Alyson, who shared insight into Alexis’ work peppered with some endearing snippets from her life, from her interest in the witch trials at Chelmsford’s Primrose Hill to her teenage romance with a biker and her lab-rescued pet rat, Rodger, who featured in some of her work. The piece Nina fixing her car was a point of intrigue for Alyson. The storyboard features a delicate pair of hands fixing a car with mechanic’s tools. Hunter vandalised the scene with ink in places where grease and dirt would normally appear. As Alyson added, “Men do not get dirty. They make sure they don’t get dirty. They do everything in a completely different way.”

In The Object Series, we see the strength of Hunter’s work at its most powerful. Designed as an experimental project on the female gaze, the series features male models photographed across New York City. Depersonalised and sexualised images of topless men with biker belts, leather trousers and phallic cigarette placements point to the idealised American machismo at the time, that Hunter mischievously pays homage to and parodies. These images are a perfect summary of her work: using humour and desire to playfully turn the male gaze upside down.