"In 200 spectacular photographs and a wonderfully evocative text, world-famous Life photographer Carl Mydans and veteran journalist Michael Demarest take us on an extraordinary journey through China, bringing the land and the people to life . . . . . They visited Shanghai, Peking, Canton, Hangchow and Kweilin and photographed the ancient palaces and temples as well as the crowded activity of the back alleyways where the people still live . . . . Illustrated...

The photographs in 'Ground' are taken from an archive of 145,000 images from 1935-1943 for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal agency ... within the Department of Agriculture ... The FSA photography division was run ... by Roy Stryker, who ... routinely damaged FSA negatives with a hole punch to prevent them from being printed. Some of the negatives he punched (referred to by the FSA as 'killed') were poor exposures or had been ruined...