Scarcity in Visual Memory: Creating a Mural of Sylvia Pankhurst

This chapter looks at the “premediation” (Erll & Rigney, 2009) of a mural of
the early 20th-century activist Sylvia Pankhurst and considers a number
of photographs that it remediates, asking the question: How did these
images end up here? The chapter follows the images in relation to broader
characteristics of Pankhurst’s remembrance, exploring the long and
often complicated pathways they take to become carriers of cultural
memory. This exploration reveals the many different forms of political
or aesthetic attachment behind the mural, which themselves are shaped
by institutional, financial, or technological constraints and possibilities,
and demonstrates that even in a culture of “post-scarcity” (Hoskins, 2018)
and supposed imagistic abundance the visual memory of activism is still
governed by scarcity.