Gulparai, 12, (L) smokes heroin along side her mother Sabera and brother Zaher, 14, (R) August 27, 2007 in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Afghan boys attend their Quran study sessions at the Islami Noor religious school on May 12, 2011 in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Despite recent multiple attacks near the city's downtown, children continue their studies at the school. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Three secondary schoolboys smoking an illicit cigarette in Hyde Park, London. (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images). May 1972

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 kid from Sichuan provice smokes at an assistance center February 23, 2005 in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. The kids, ranging in age from 7 to 16, are temporary residents of the center, one of the institutions established by China's departments of civil affairs to help and administer beggars, vagrants and juvenile delinquents, after rescission of China's compulsory detainment and relocation system. (Photo by Cancan Chu/Getty Images)

Two women lighting cigarettes on a tennis court in Essex, England circa 1930's. (Photo by Keystone View/FPG/Getty Images)

Naturally, it is important that a baby learn the right habits. This woman demonstrates that smoking is wrong for babies. From a series of images parodying women's lifestyle and beauty magazines. (Photo by Jacobsen/Getty Images). 1955