Actress Victoria Justice arrives at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards at Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE on August 28, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images)

Fishermen pull up a live 2.5 metre crocodile in their net in the Western Amazon region, Brazil on September 20, 2017. The fishermen were fishing for a large river fish called Arapaima but sometimes crocodiles become stuck in the nets as well. (Photo by Carl de Souza/AFP Photo)

In this October 5, 2016 photo a man looks at the work “Not to be Reproduced” by Rene Magritte at the Kunsthalle art gallery in Hamburg, Germany. The exhibition, which runs from Oct. 7, 2016 until Jan. 22, 2017, features more than 150 masterpieces of surrealism from four of the most significant European private collections of the 20th century. (Photo by Daniel Reinhardt/DPA via AP Photo)

Yaroslav Segeda at the top of a high rise building in Kudrinskaya Square, Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Yaroslav Segeda/Caters News)

Model Alessandra Ambrosio poses for photographers during the red carpet for the movie “Spotlight” at the 72nd Venice Film Festival in northern Italy, September 3, 2015. (Photo by Stefano Rellandini/Reuters)

A vervet monkey passes in front of a woman on the shores of lake Naivasha, Kenya January 24, 2017. (Photo by Goran Tomasevic/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.

Colombia's Harold Tejada climb Plateau des Glieres during the stage 18 of the Tour de France cycling race over 175 kilometers (108.7 miles) from Meribel to La Roche-sur-Foron, France, Thursday, September 17, 2020. (Photo by Thibault Camus/AP Photo)