“I was born in Zimbabwe, Africa in 1981 and grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I graduated with a degree in Acting, and after college, worked as an actor and musician for the Santa Fe Shakespeare Festival, the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, and the California Shakespeare Theater. I have had a lifelong passion for drawing, painting, and sculpture since I first saw Michelangelo's “Head of Leda” in a book in the library”.

An Iranian soldier guards two German tourists near the Iranian-Turkish border during World War II. Since the British occupation of Iran, all Axis nationals are being expelled from the country. (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images). Circa 1941

Haitians pull a car atop a pushcart in Port-au-Prince, October 11, 1994. The price of gasoline has fallen to about $6 US per gallon since U.S. forces occupied Haiti. Before, gasoline had cost as much as $10 U.S. per gallon. (Photo by Eric Draper/AP Photo)

A man walks past a mural depicting US actors John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson holding thermometers instead of guns amid the Covid-19 pandemic, in Tel Aviv on March 1, 2021. (Photo by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP Photo)

The 29-year-old English actress Kimberley Garner is seen in Cannes, France on May 20, 2019. (Photo by The Mega Agency)

British singer-songwriter Rita Ora treats herself to a pretty pink martini in the last decade of January 2025. (Photo by ritaora/Instagram)

Nicole Kidman arrives for the world premiere of "Holland" at the Paramount Theatre during the South by Southwest Conference and Festival on Sunday, March 9, 2025, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP Photo)

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.