A wall of colonial faces refuses to let you pass.
They are men photographed in the 1870s — enlarged beyond portraiture, beyond individuality. Their collars dissolve into grain; their whiskers soften into texture; their expressions flatten into something closer to posture than personality. Their eyes hover at shoulder height, unblinking.
Across their likenesses are pinned fragments of print culture: postcards, pamphlets, badges, ministerial portrait cards, clipped advertisements. One torn leaflet reads Australia Unlimited in optimistic serif. Another bears the words White Australia in firm, declarative type. A card presents a grid of suited officials encircling a central figure — governance rendered as pantheon.
The effect is architectural rather than illustrative. Empire here is not anecdote. It is structure.
Erin Lee’s exhibition The Crimson Thread turns on Queen Elizabeth II’s Royal Tour of Australia in 1954 — the first visit by a reigning monarch and an event that drew extraordinary crowds. Contemporary accounts describe towns halting work, children lining roads in pressed uniforms, bunting threading suburban streets. Photographs from the tour entered newsprint and family albums alike: women in gloves leaning forward, men craning from rooftops, the Queen’s dresses luminous even in grain.
It’s easy to reflect on colonial memory because it’s still so present — the remnants are everywhere.
In that mid-century moment, the tour functioned as reassurance. It affirmed that Australia remained tethered to Britain; that imperial ceremony retained authority at the far edge of a dissolving empire; that national identity could be staged through crowd, costume and camera.
Lee does not return to 1954 to reconstruct spectacle. She studies what spectacle left behind — how reassurance settled into habit.
Rather than restaging the parade, she retraces the itinerary in the present, photographing what contemporary settler Australia looks like along those same routes. The premise is exacting: if the Royal Tour performed a national identity grounded in British patrimony, what remains of that performance now? Not in fanfare, but in land title, suburban architecture, churches and domestic interiors — in the quiet sites where power ceases to announce itself and instead becomes ordinary.
The question is not whether monarchy persists as image. It is how it persists as authorisation — through paperwork and property, ritual and repetition, through language embedded so deeply that it rarely feels chosen.
Objects Before Faces
A group of small, precisely photographed objects appears within the exhibition: instruments of measure, ordered natural specimens, decorative forms, a familiar introduced animal. The prints are modest in scale. The lighting is spare. They resist drama.
Rather than functioning as illustration, these objects register as systems. They evoke judgement and administration, classification and possession — the habits through which empire converts land, life and belief into legible categories. What might otherwise read as neutral arrangement begins to suggest something more enduring: authority embedded in the ordinary.
The Crimson Thread is not concerned with monarchy as spectacle but with monarchy as authorisation — the structure underwriting property, religion, whiteness and heritage. Lee photographs not outrage but maintenance.
A large, slightly blurred image of a crown recurs within the body of work. Enlarged and softened, it carries the scale of an altarpiece without the clarity of an icon. It does not gleam. It refuses theatricality. In Australia, the sovereign is seldom visible in daily life; the Crown, however, remains written into law. The image suggests something absorbed so completely into constitutional language that it no longer needs to declare itself to operate.
Domestic space becomes another register of continuity. A woman stands with her back to the camera at a white picket fence, wearing a yellow dress whose cut and tone recall mid-century royal imagery. The scene could belong to any suburb. That modesty is the point. The past repeats itself not through parade but through posture, fabric and architecture — through the choreography of comfort.
A framed portrait of the Queen rests within a domestic interior, kept and displayed. It is neither ironic nor devotional. It simply exists — as décor, as inheritance. Monarchy persists not only in institutions but in interiors.
A sign marking Crown land regulation punctuates a rural landscape. The typography is bureaucratic and restrained. A small church sits among trees, white against green. A Bible lies open in controlled light. None of these images accuses. Their restraint is their force. Sovereignty here is administrative rather than theatrical. The Crown operates less as symbol than as framework — a legal fiction embedded in land taken from its First Peoples.
Lee withholds commentary. She trusts recognition.
Installation detail of The Crimson Thread. Courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Australian Photography.
The Black Swan
Among the exhibition’s quieter images is one that lingers: a black swan gliding across dark water at dusk. Reflection and shadow share the surface evenly. The bird’s neck curves with painterly calm. Its red beak registers not as flourish but as fact — a precise interruption of the dark.
In Western Australia, the black swan functions as state emblem; nationally, it has been absorbed into civic iconography. Lee resists that flattening. Framed in red — the colour threading through the project’s design — the swan reads not as ornament but as presence.
The border suggests lineage and boundary, inheritance and constraint. Within it, the swan — native to the continent — occupies the same symbolic field as the Crown elsewhere in the exhibition. One gesture points toward imported sovereignty; the other toward land and life that predate it.
Australia’s constitutional monarchy persists largely through habit. The 1999 referendum on republicanism failed; subsequent debates have receded without resolution. Royal visits continue to attract attention, though rarely with the fervour of 1954. The monarchy endures less through spectacle than through continuity. Lee photographs continuity.
Her images do not mock affection or dismiss nostalgia. They examine how sentiment hardens into structure. A picket fence implies safety. A church implies continuity. A portrait implies reverence. A crown implies tradition. The exhibition does not insist. It accumulates.
Architecture of Policy
The mural of colonial administrators consolidates these concerns into a single field.
The enlarged faces cease to function as portraits and begin to operate as infrastructure. They are not caricatured villains; they are ordinary men whose decisions shaped Federation and racial policy. Over their likenesses, archival fragments create a dense field of nation-building imagery: pamphlets, badges, postcards, official portrait cards. The typography is cheerful. The layouts are composed. The language is confident.
The White Australia policy, formalised through the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 and dismantled incrementally between the 1950s and 1973, was never clandestine. It was printed, circulated and defended. Lee’s intervention is measured: she presents racism as design. Exclusion appears not only as legislation but as layout — something legible, distributable, repeatable.
Scale alters perception. The faces loom; the ephemera adhere. Historical distance contracts. Racial policy ceases to be abstract and becomes spatial.
Lee describes her method as speculative documentary photography. She does not fabricate history; she interrogates how documentary once helped stabilise it. The Royal Tour was recorded obsessively. Cameras did not simply capture admiration; they organised it. Lee’s camera turns that organising impulse inward, examining how images participate in authority.
Her photographs move between contemporary landscapes and staged gestures, between archival fragments and present-day observation. The oscillation is deliberate. Certainty never quite settles. That instability mirrors the nation itself: modern and multicultural, yet constitutionally tethered to imperial forms.
Inheritance Without Spectacle
What distinguishes The Crimson Thread is its refusal of melodrama. The images are composed, measured, often beautiful. Lee does not blunt aesthetic appeal to signal critique. She understands that imperial symbolism relied on beauty — on ceremony rendered elegant and desirable.
The exhibition does not argue for or against republicanism. It asks something quieter: what remains absorbed as common sense? Which privileges feel inherited rather than constructed? What persists precisely because it no longer appears dramatic?
The title draws from Henry Parkes’s description of Australia’s connection to Britain as “the crimson thread of kinship” — a phrase that imagined the nation as bound to empire by blood and loyalty. Lee neither severs nor dramatises the thread. She traces it.
In 1954, reassurance required spectacle. In 2025, reassurance resides in constitutional language, inherited symbols and the quiet grammar of belonging.
The photographs accumulate rather than accuse. They persist rather than proclaim.
And in that persistence lies the challenge: to recognise atmosphere as design — and to understand that what feels like background may, in fact, be history still at work.
A Practice of Territory, Belief, Authority
If The Crimson Thread stands as Erin Lee’s most sustained excavation of colonial inheritance to date, it also emerges from a broader and remarkably consistent set of concerns that animate her practice: the visual regimes through which systems of power become felt, believed and lived.
Several earlier projects make that continuity unmistakable.
In Veneration, Lee examined the rise of modern devotional movements in Mexico not as spectacle but as response — communities turning to folkloric saints and alternative deities amid exclusion from prevailing social systems and their promised rights. Photographing roadside shrines, domestic altars and improvised offerings, she explored how belief materialises through objects and ritual repetition.
Candles arranged in grids, rosaries cast against plaster walls, fragments of sacred imagery — these were not curiosities but evidence of how faith becomes spatial and sustaining. The project revealed Lee’s interest in how visual culture underwrites allegiance, particularly in contexts where political and religious authority has failed to provide belonging.
Este Lado / This Side extended that inquiry into a terrain shaped by geopolitical boundary and lived experience. Developed collaboratively with residents from cities along Mexico’s northern border, the project portrays lives, memories and future hopes in communities often defined externally by violence.
Rather than reinforcing spectacle or stereotype, Lee’s images attend to continuity — to domestic interiors, expansive landscapes and everyday gestures that complicate the mythology of the “American Dream.” As in The Crimson Thread, territory emerges not as abstraction but as inhabited condition: negotiated, layered and deeply lived.
Her series Legal Fiction draws these threads closer to the concerns of her current exhibition. The title signals the paradox at its centre: law, however abstract, produces material consequence. Investigating the creation and cultivation of a white society in Australia, the project examines how scientific, legal and social frameworks were mobilised to legitimise racial entitlement. Lineage, sovereignty and belonging emerge not as abstractions but as structures embedded in institutional language.
The Crown operates within the same logic — a constitutional symbol embedded in statute, land title and bureaucratic form. In The Crimson Thread, Lee photographs Crown land signage, administrative typography and suburban architecture with the same measured attention she brought to legal language and institutional space.
Her engagement with photobooks reinforces this continuity. The book is not ancillary documentation but disciplined argument. In Este Lado / This Side, sequencing produces rhythm — proximity and interruption mirroring the daily realities of life along geopolitical lines. In Veneration, the turn of the page echoes devotional repetition, ritual carried forward through paper and image.
In The Crimson Thread, the book form allows archival fragments and contemporary photographs to gather across pages as they do across walls — image against image, object against text, inheritance against inheritance. Meaning accrues through adjacency. The photobook becomes a medium through which Lee’s method clarifies itself: architecture, atmosphere, text and surface assembled as evidence rather than ornament.
This consistency across projects explains why The Crimson Thread feels less like departure than culmination. Lee does not treat institution as monolith to be denounced, nor does she caricature structure as villain. She photographs how systems — religious devotion, geopolitical boundary, law, monarchy — become ordinary, embedded, credible. Her attention is drawn to the quiet spaces where power has already settled.
Her editorial work, published in outlets ranging from The Guardian to The Wall Street Journal, deepens this sensibility: an awareness of how images circulate and stabilise shared narratives. Whether photographing ceremony, domestic interior or administrative signage, her eye remains attuned to the relationship between the visible and what is permitted to remain unseen.
Seen together, these projects position The Crimson Thread not as a singular political statement, but as the latest articulation of a sustained inquiry into how visual culture produces and sustains authority.
The photographs in The Crimson Thread do not raise their voices. They accumulate. Meaning emerges through sequence, adjacency and the quiet authority of detail. In the conversation that follows, Lee reflects on the Royal Tour as image-making machinery, on her use of speculative documentary as method, and on the persistence of constitutional symbolism in everyday life. If the exhibition traces how inheritance becomes atmosphere, the interview reveals how that atmosphere is constructed — and why it continues to matter.
The work I’ve made in Australia comes from questioning my own position in this world. — Erin Lee
You were born in Aotearoa / New Zealand and are now based in Melbourne. How did your early life and movement between places shape your way of seeing and working with photography?
I grew up in a small town in the South Island of Aotearoa, in my early twenties my adventurousness and curiosity about the world and the people in it took me out of NZ. I’ve always found it fascinating, how a camera gives you access to things and into people’s lives that you wouldn’t get without it. Of course, you must be respectful of that but the times I have moved or travelled to different parts of the world, then photography projects often become a way to meet people or strike up conversations with strangers.
What first led you to photography, and when did it become clear that this would be your primary form of expression?
I discovered photography as a teenager I took the subject in high school and instantly fell in love with it, I’d always been a creative kid, but I wasn’t good at painting or drawing and was frustrated by that. So, when I started photography, I loved how I could express my ideas using the camera as a tool. And those first experiences learning to develop film and print in a darkroom are magical.
Your practice moves between documentary, portraiture, and long-term research projects. What would you say are the central concerns that continue to shape your work?
Since moving back to live in Australia in 2019 my research work has focused on historical colonial violence here and how the 20th century obsession with keeping Australia white has impacted society today. Making photographs about this I see as expanded documentary and I will mix whatever I think the project calls for; portraits, landscapes, archival material, writings etc. The re-emergence of white supremacist thinking we are seeing is something that never truly went away, and I’d like to contribute whatever voice I have towards counteracting that.
Many of your projects engage with history, identity, and cultural structures. What draws you to these subjects, and how do you begin researching a new body of work?
The work I’ve made in Australia comes from questioning my own position in this world, and the social structures we unconsciously (or consciously) participate in. I think anyone with white privilege should be questioning their position and taking action to redistribute it. Previously, I lived in Mexico City for some years where my projects tended to investigate other sub-cultures or groups – for example, I was very interested about the practices of religion there and I made work about that, and another project about what it was like to grow up in a US/MX border town.
To research a new body of work I start reading books and internet research and will think about what kind of pictures I could make to represent these ideas.
The Crimson Thread is a project that unfolded over several years. How did the idea first emerge, and what sustained your engagement with it over such a long period?
I started this body of work for a master’s degree in 2021, I wanted to make work about land sovereignty in Australia and was reading about pre-colonial indigenous agricultural systems. The first ideas came from imagining what the land was like here before colonisation and takeover. As a non-Indigenous person, it was important that I talk about these topics in a way that denounces my own ancestor’s histories, which led me to ask, what does the Royal Family represent today in countries which were colonised by the British Empire? All the research and image making for the project was done in 2021 & 2022, but I didn’t publish the book until 2025.
Retracing Queen Elizabeth II’s 1954 Royal Tour gives the project a very specific historical framework. How did working within this structure shape the way you approached photographing contemporary Australia?
It was a way of putting parameters on making the project. The topic of white sovereignty in Australia could be documented almost anywhere, so containing it to the Royal Tour – also the first time a reigning monarch had come to Australia – was a way to anchor the topic to the queen and what she symbolises. Also, many of the places she visited are still marked by memorials commemorating those dates.
The work reflects on colonial memory without relying heavily on archival imagery. How did you decide what to show, and what to leave implicit?
It was easy to reflect on colonial memory because it’s still so present. That is one difference I really notice between NZ & Australia and part of what I’m trying to highlight with this project, is the level to which Australia continues to honour and glorify our British history. The remnants are everywhere. That was one of my image-making strategies, to photograph anything I saw that represented residue of our British history or national pride related to our colonial history. I think seeing these things in a contemporary context implies that we still have ongoing tendencies which sustain white privilege and modern colonialism.
My research work has focused on historical colonial violence and how the obsession with keeping Australia white has shaped society today.
How has it been to see The Crimson Thread presented at the Museum of Australian Photography, and has the exhibition format changed the way you now understand the project?
I’m very happy it’s being shown and MAPh and that I could explore a new way of presenting the project. For this exhibition format I decided to include imagery which expands on the roots and research behind the project, including portraits of some of the earliest colonial invaders photographed here in the 1870s, and an exploration of how the imagery of the White Australia policies promoted a vision of a white national identity. Alongside the photographs and archival material tracing the Queen’s tour which highlight the ongoing celebration of British and colonial history, and how strongly our past still exists in the present.
You place great importance on sequencing and book-making. What role does the photobook play in your practice, and how do you approach constructing a book narrative?
I love using photobooks as a medium because it becomes an intimate object that can be sequenced and curated, it can travel and live on. Working on sequencing can take different approaches depending on the project, but I generally start by making mini sequences of 2, 3, 4, 5 images and then using those groups as the building blocks of creating the overall narrative.
Could you speak about the development of the book editions of The Crimson Thread, and what you were hoping readers might experience through the book?
The first presentation of The Crimson Thread was an exhibition at Le Space, which included a handmade version of the book. That version contained a section—similar to the research-focused component of the MaPH exhibition—drawing on archival material around Australia’s federation and the influence of White Australia policies. When I made the print-run of the book in 2025, I didn’t include this material and focused on the Queen as the central protagonist of the work. Including the original book within a larger exhibition context allowed for more background and research to be presented alongside the images. However, for the print edition, I wanted the book to remain more tightly focused on questioning the role of the Queen and her connection to Australia and our British history.
What are you currently working on, and where do you see your practice moving in the coming years?
I used to live in Mexico City and I’m about to head back there for a while, so I’ll be making new work while I’m there. I have a few ideas I’m excited to explore, and I haven’t visited Mexico since I stopped living there, so I’m really looking forward to reconnecting.
I’ve been working for the past couple of years on a project in Australia called Legal Fiction, which examines the creation and cultivation of a white society in Australia. I’ll be editing the work and hope to show or publish it in some format in the second half of this year. I see my practice continuing in a similar way. I value the balance I’ve had over the past few years between working, teaching, and my practice as an artist, and I hope to continue that while making work that feels fulfilling and can be exhibited and published.
Exhibition Details
Erin Lee
The Crimson Thread
Atrium Gallery, Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh)
4 December 2025 – 9 March 2026
For exhibition information visit:
www.museumofaustralianphotography.org.au
Artist website:
www.erinleephotography.com
