Japanese music duo Ami and Aya arrive for the Christian Dior Fall/Winter 2023-2024 ready-to-wear collection presented Tuesday, February 28, 2023 in Paris. (Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP Photo)

A reveller daubed in “Gulal” or coloured powder celebrates Holi, the Hindu spring festival of colours in Bhopal on March 6, 2023. (Photo by Gagan Nayar/AFP Photo)

A picture released by the North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) shows Kim Jong-un convening an urgent operation meeting at 0:30 am on March 29, 2013 at an undisclosed location, in which he ordered strategic rocket forces to be on standby to strike US and South Korean targets at any time. (Photo by KCNA via EPA)

North Korean soldiers look at South Korea across the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), on December 22, 2011 in Panmunjom, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

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.

A zookeeper counts penguins through an observation window during the annual stocktake at ZSL London Zoo in central London on January 3, 2023. (Photo by Justin Tallis/AFP Photo)

Spanish singer Rosalia Vila Tobella, known mononymously as Rosalía performs during Louis Vuitton Menswear ready-to-wear Fall/Winter 2023-2024 collection show as part of Men's Fashion Week in Paris, France on January 19, 2023. (Photo by Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters)

Sydney Peng, 19, who has been dancing for eleven years, performs a Chinese opera dance in celebration of the Lunar New Year, in the rotunda of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., on Sunday, January 22, 2023. (Photo by Richard Tsong-Taatariii/Star Tribune via AP Photo)