Last May, Trevor Paglen, a 32-year-old artist and self-described “experimental geographer,” flew to Kabul to photograph a CIA prison that does not officially exist.

In 1962, when Kevin Walsh was six years old, all of the lampposts suddenly vanished from his block of Sixth Avenue in Bay Ridge. ...

In 1939, the writer James Agee moved to Flatbush to work on a magazine article about Brooklyn. By then, Agee was an established figure in New York’s literary left, and he was on assignment for Fortune, which at the time was one of the most liberal magazines in the country.