The last time Karl visited Manchester was in the 1990s. That was before the bomb. The city is different now, it shines with steel and glass. He is struck by how much is high-rise is going up all over the place. Karl begins to explore this new landscape and the squares that nestle between the buildings. To his surprise, he comes across a statue of Friedrich Engels.

In the 1840s, Engels lived in Manchester, where he was led through the slums by his Irish lover. And where he wrote about the horror of industrial working conditions and the dark future of capitalism. This town would soon become “shock city.” An industrial powerhouse. There was nowhere else like it in the world. Das Manchestertum.

Karl’s memories of Manchester in the 1970s all seem to be in black and white, but maybe that’s just his memories of the photographs documenting deindustrialization, urban decay, and moody album covers. It was also in that same monochrome decade that a statue of Friedrich Engels could be found somewhere in Soviet Ukraine.

Like everyone else, Karl has seen how times changed and how the world order shifted. As the collapse spread, walls came tumbling down and the seismic events left Engel’s statue knocked to the ground, cut in half and dumped.

Years later, his statue was tracked down, acquired and then hauled across Europe to Manchester. Here, it was erected once again, and Karl is now standing at the foot of it.

The backdrop to the statue is the mustard yellow facade of a building which boasts 700 spaces for business and casual car parking. Karl looks through the view finder and is glad he put colour film in his vintage German camera. Not long after, he posted the photograph on his website with a caption of just one word. Discuss.