Young category winner. Great autumn morning by Fabian Dalpiaz. (Photo by Fabian Dalpiaz/2018 Astronomy Photographer of the Year)

A displaced Palestinian boy, who fled from home due to Israeli strikes, gets a haircut at a tent camp in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on January 8, 2024. (Photo by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters)

Firework display from the top of the Sky Tower to welcome the New Year on January 1, 2015 in Auckland, New Zealand. (Photo by Dave Rowland/Getty Images)

English singer, songwriter, and actress Paloma Faith looks stunning as the new face of Agent Provocateur on September 8, 2015. The 34-year-old singer models the latest Famous Knickers Forever AW 2015 collection. Paloma once worked at the lingerie store's Soho branch in London. (Photo by Alice Hawkins/Splash News and Pictures)

Despite the mild 14°С shoppers and commuters battle against the wind and rain on Waterloo Bridge, London on December 28, 2022. (Photo by Alex Lentati/London News Pictures)

Men dressed as soldiers pose with models before the opening of the Gamescom 2013 fair in Cologne,Germany, on August 23, 2013. The Gamescom convention is Europe's largest video games trade fair. (Photo by Ina Fassbender/Reuters)

The tusk of a woolly mammoth that lived some 18,000 years ago, from which researchers sequenced the extinct mammal's entire genome, is seen in northeastern Siberia in this photo from 2015. (Photo by Love Dalen/Handout via Reuters)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.