From 1982 to 1985, Hunter pursued a Master of Fine Arts degree at Ohio University, where he studied with Professor Arnold Gasson.
[4][5]" (Louisville/Clermont, KY, 1984) Hunter's interest in 19th-century processes began in the late 1970s while he working for the El Paso Public Library, where he made prints from glass-plate negatives.
After receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1986, Hunter moved to Atlanta [Fulton County], Georgia, where he taught photography at several universities for the following fifteen years.
"[7] In the catalog of a solo exhibition at Jackson Fine Art in 1998, "Frank Hunter: Laments," (June 4-July 31) the photographer and critic John Rosenthal wrote: "In Hunter's photographs, many of which reach out to a poised moment of ripeness, the journey to darkness is implicit--a sorrow that his quest for the brief moment of perfect light has taught him.
The works not only resemble the stark compositions in photography's early formalist experiments, they intentionally mimic an even earlier phase in the medium's development and the fragile, aged images taken a century ago.
For the next 13 years he taught all the wet-darkroom and alternative-process classes at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
[13] In 2010 Duke University mounted an exhibition of his Appalachian photos, entitled “Still point of the Turning World.”[12] The Kennedy Museum, Athens, Ohio showed a series of photographs made in the 1980s in rural Athens County Ohio (2017) In 2010 Hunter was part of a project funded by the Cultural Landscape Foundation entitled “Every tree Tells a Story.” Hunter made a series of photographs of the scarred bodies of long-leaf pines that produce turpentine.
In 2016 Washington University mounted an exhibition of Hunter's Appalachian platinum/palladium photographs from their permanent collection: "Director's Cut: Recent Photography Gifts to the NCMA" April 4, 2015 – September 13, 2015.
"Highlights include.... Frank Hunter's dramatic skyscapes, such as Light in a Summer Night #3, capture the power of nature and the magic of twilight as it settles over the stadium.
"[32] 2015-2016 "Actual Size: Exploring the Photographic Contact Print," Cassilhaus, Chapel Hill, NC (December 15, 2015 - March 15, 2016) Catalog of the exhibition.