'The Object series was produced in a period when the idea of the ‘male gaze’ was just coming into currency in feminist circles. Laura Mulvey wrote her influential essay ‘Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema’ in 1973, and it was published in 1975, the year after Hunter produced this series of photographs. Mulvey wrote “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/ male and passive/ female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly.” Here we find Hunter exploring pleasure in looking, turning her gaze to the passive male figure, which is rendered objectlike: faceless, and reduced to parts. While the male figure remains partially clothed, Hunter has positioned his leather-clad trouserfront in close proximity to a variety of potent phallic symbols: a cigarette, the towers of the World Trade Centre, a sports car and the elongated toe of a cowboy boot, emblem of US American masculinity. As in many of Hunter’s works there is considerable ambiguity at play here: as good feminists should we enjoy the tables being turned? Should we feel gross for deriving pleasure from looking at an objectified male body in this way? How should we read the emphasis on the phallus as an object of desire? Should we find it erotic? Comic? An exhausting expression of the status quo?' - Hettie Judah