The Five Best Photo Stories You Might Have Missed This Year 

This year was big for hype surrounding Detroit’s so-called comeback story—we’re looking at you, New York Times—but Dave Jordano’s book, Detroit: Unbroken Down is an important reminder that the city wasn’t invented yesterday. Hardworking residents have stuck with the Motor City through good times and bad, and in this August story, they’re given their deservedly front-and-center place. –Jordan G. Teicher

Between the Syrian refugee crisis and debates in the U.S. about immigration, 2015 was, in a way, defined by borders, making Flo Razowsky’s series “Up Against the Wall,” about the physical structures that demarcate them, all the more timely. “I think considering the actual structures allows us to consider the global connections of power—why these structures exist, who builds them, to what ends, and who is impacted by them,” she told me when I interviewed her for Behold. –Jordan G. Teicher

How can you not love a project that began at Copenhell? Jacob Ehrbahn, a Danish photojournalist, was assigned to cover the heavy-metal festival by the newspaper Politiken. He loved the images and decided to travel around Europe to other festivals where he eventually took more than 14,000 images he whittled down to 67 for his book Headbangers. The photographs are vibrant, exciting, and a lot of fun to look at. Ehrbahn wisely kept his camera away from his face while taking the shots. “You could end up with a camera in your brain,” he said. –David Rosenberg

There are plenty of stories about gentrification and the changing faces of cities. Janet Delaney doesn’t see change as a negative but feels a more evolved look at how the old and new can coexist is a better thought process. Few cities bring this adjustment more to mind than San Francisco. Delaney’s look back at the SOMA neighborhood in the early 1980s is a gorgeous remembrance of what the area once was. “I’m not nostalgic,” she said. “But I find one of my major commitments to photography is its ability to provide a way of time travel so we can hold the past in the present.” –David Rosenberg

When it comes to vintage photography collections, the bigger and weirder the better. (Case in point.) Earlier this year, we featured a project from collector W.M. Hunt of quirky vintage group photos that have the double pleasure of not just being strange but being relatable as well. Everyone has had to pose for an uncomfortable class pictures or a forced team photos, so everyone can appreciate the awkwardness of the moment and the charming absurdity of this collection. ­–Miriam Krule