By Andy Grundberg

There's a theological bent to this season's books of and about photographs, as some of the titles reviewed below attest: ''Revelation'' (singular), ''Revelations'' (plural), ''The Passions,'' ''The Devil's Playground.'' But big biblical themes like temptation, renunciation, redemption and grace can also be found in unexpected places, like ''One Big Self,'' a startling collection of portraits of convicted felons in a Louisiana prison, and ''What Remains,'' Sally Mann's new book of freighted landscapes and portraits of the dead. (These, too, are reviewed below.) Another sign of the times is a wealth of photographic literature, from collections of essays by the curator David Travis (''At the Edge of the Light,'' published by David R. Godine) and the critic David Levi Strauss (''Between the Eyes,'' published by Aperture) to attempts to write the recent history of photography as an art (David Campany's ''Art and Photography,'' from Phaidon, and the Tate Modern's catalog to last summer's mega-show, ''Cruel and Tender''). Equally literary, though less easy to pigeonhole, is ''The Montesi Scandal'' (University of Chicago), Karen Pinkus's captivating account -- in quasi-screenplay form -- of the moment in postwar Italy when politics, cinema and paparazzi photography coalesced into a single culture. Could moths, too, be a trend? Two books take the unassuming creatures as their subject: Mike and Doug Starn's ''Attracted to Light,'' reviewed below, and Joseph Scheer's ''Night Visions: The Secret Designs of Moths,'' published by Prestel (Scheer makes his color pictures by placing moths directly on a high-resolution scanner). And for those whose photography libraries lack a classic heft, there are major collections of the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (Thames and Hudson), Jacques Henri Lartigue (Abrams) and Julia Margaret Cameron (Getty).