NYC no pants subway ride. Thousands of straphangers took their pants off for the 15th annual "No Pants Subway Ride" hosted by Improv Everywhere. People gathered at seven meeting points throughout the five boroughs at 3PM. All participants met up at Union Square around 5PM to and had a pant-less celebration and the afterparty at Webster Hall. (Photo by Paul Martinka/The New York Post)

The ruins of a castle stand above the town of Rocca Calascio, close to Santo Stefano di Sessanio in the province of L'Aquila in Abruzzo, inside the national park of the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga, Italy, September 7, 2016. (Photo by Siegfried Modola/Reuters)

A Tibetan Buddhist nun spins a prayer wheel in sub zero temperatures at a Buddhist laymen lodge where thousands of people gather for daily chanting session during the Utmost Bliss Dharma Assembly, the last of the four Dharma assemblies at Larung Wuming Buddhist Institute in remote Sertar county, Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan province, China November 1, 2015. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

A Russian prisoner eating bread. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images). Finland, circa 1940

Francisco da Silva Vale, 61, cools off fish with ice produced on solar-powered ice machines at Vila Nova do Amana community in the Sustainable Development Reserve, in Amazonas state, Brazil, September 23, 2015. Three solar-powered machines, are producing about ninety kilos of ice per day, in a region with poor access to electric energy, which used to be produced only with diesel oil, in the Amazon rain forest. (Photo by Bruno Kelly/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.

Men are held by Iraqi national security agents, to be interrogated at a checkpoint, as oil fields burn in Qayara, south of Mosul, Iraq, Saturday, November 5, 2016. Islamic State fighters launch counterattacks in the thin strip of territory Iraqi special forces have recaptured in eastern Mosul, highlighting the challenges ahead as the battle moves into more densely populated neighborhoods where coalition air power must be used more selectively. (Photo by Felipe Dana/AP Photo)