Testimonials

“Patrick Dransfield is an old friend, a business partner, and also has proved to be a helpful pilot for many Chinese corporate lawyers, including me, as we attempted to integrate into the international business of law. It is only recently, that I have been introduced to another Patrick Dransfield - the writer and photographer - and I consider it a great honor to write down some of my own impressions and musings on this recently discovered Patrick for his book, “Track of Time: Moments of Transition”. Patrick, himself, is also an active participant, as well as a recorder, of the modernization of China. We Chinese should thank Patrick for what he recorded for posterity in 1986, and remember who we were, and are.” 

Xiao Chen, Beijing-based corporate lawyer. 

“Bearing witness to history takes an acute and inspired sense of the moment – what western culture borrows from the East as “mindfulness”.  Patrick Dransfield was drawn to Beijing in the mid-1980s….In “Track of Time: Moments of Transition”, the artist documents the best of a society:  cooperation, industry and youthful innovation: and hope. The subjects are always themselves dignified, even if the daily tasks they perform are difficult or physically challenging.”

Dr Charles Keller, Scientific Director, Children’s Cancer Therapy Development Institute (CC-TDI).

“Three years several emails and one pandemic later Patrick’s lost hoard of photographs has finally made it into the October 17 edition of the Financial Times’ How to Spend It magazine. ‘My Beijing Spring’ traces his observations as a young but enthusiastic amateur photographer, and offers a fascinating portrait of a way of life that has since immeasurably changed.”

Jo Ellison, Editor, How To Spend It. 

“We are all the luckier for seeing these pictures through the deeply empathetic lens that Patrick Dransfield brought to Beijing in 1986.”

Rana Mitter OBE FBA, Professor of the History & Politics of Modern China, Oxford University