ChinaFile

The photographer James Whitlow Delano says he finds beauty in melancholy. For more than two decades, he has sought it out around the edges of the often ebullient story of China’s economic rise. His book Empire: Impressions from China, published in 2005, focused on loss of heritage amid China’s dramatic social upheavals and used the techniques of the darkroom to enhance its subjects’ appearance of timelessness, casting them in the somber tones of the 19th-century photographs Delano collects. The