SEASON’S READINGS : The Call of Duty : Some photographers move from conflict to conflict. Others are there for the long haul.

There are endless opportunities for photojournalists to document man’s ongoing inhumanity to man, from Haiti to Bosnia to the Persian Gulf or the West Bank. One must wonder if the world is becoming so inured to violence--on our city’s streets or in villages throughout the third world--that searing images which should stop us in our tracks fail to penetrate our bombarded senses. Yet photographers will, and must, continue to shoot these pictures, hoping that their images will somehow change the world. Witness James Nachtwey’s continuing documentation of the world’s conflicts, Gilles Peress’ ongoing chronicle of ethnic and religious war with his latest book on the violence in Sarajevo. And last year, Annie Liebovitz, the darling of Vanity Fair and vanity portraits, found herself shooting black and white in the former Yugoslavia.

Weighing in with two hefty and ambitious volumes, Phaidon Press presents their latest contribution to the history of the world’s conflicts: Allah O Akbar: A Journey Through Militant Islam by Magnum photographer Abbas, and Humanity and Inhumanity: The Photographic Journey of George Rodger, another Magnum photographer and one of that cooperative’s founding members.

A third book represents, on a much smaller scale, another focused effort to bring attention to an ongoing struggle: the plight of the Kurds. When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds, is a collection of color images by Ed Kashi, with Christopher Hitchens providing a written narrative chronicling abuses throughout the history of the Kurds, complete with a timeline providing historical context for these images.

The Phaidon volumes, containing over 200 images and at least 300 pages, will no doubt end up on coffee tables, since once you get them to your coffee table you won’t want to lift them again. The black-and-white photographs, refreshing in today’s world of color images, are rich and gorgeously reproduced on luxurious stock that seems to give the books even more weight.

Rodgers got his start during the blitz of London and documented World War II through its end with the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. After witnessing the aftermath of Nazi atrocities there, he vowed never to photograph another war and spent the rest of his career traveling through Africa and the world, living with and documenting other cultures. The images in this book that were taken at Belsen are the most powerful in the collection. We see a young boy out for a walk, strolling past rows and rows of bodies lying in heaps, collapsed, it seems, haphazardly as if they simply lost the strength to go on. The enormity of this tragedy still boggles the mind, in part because conflict, violence, racism and ethnic wars still rage throughout the world. It is as if we have learned nothing as history marches on.

Rodgers’ book chronicles his life of social conscience and adventure while shooting and traveling for Life magazine in 1940. Rodgers never achieved the celebrity of his colleagues Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, but he was among those early pioneers of war photography, in the days when it was a lonely job. The streets of London during the Blitz were far different from the streets of Haiti during our last invasion, where for every shot fired there were legions of photographers. Rodgers was alone in London’s bomb shelters and bombed-out buildings to record the terror and how it affected the lives of Londoners.

His images are less well-known and lack the poetry and elevation of the ordinary that Cartier-Bresson’s work exudes, there are some memorable, essential images of war in this book. It is almost a textbook on the roots of photojournalism.

The book is interspersed with entries from Rodgers’ diaries, and they are written with humility and humor. His dedication is daunting, his commitment to his craft admirable.

Like Rodger, Abbas is not interested in the quick hit. Unlike so many photojournalists who flit from conflict to conflict, he devoted seven years to this volume. He uses his knowledge as an Iranian transplanted to the West to bridge the gap between these two cultures, to open the Western mind to the breadth and diversity of militant Islam.”Driven,” says Abbas in the book’s introduction, “by a desire to understand and expose the internal tensions within Muslim societies,” his book attempts to humanize and document the world of militant Islam.

Abbas spent the seven years traveling to 29 countries on four continents. Some of these images are beautiful for the sweep of the crowd, the sheer numbers of people, some heart-stopping for their sadness, sorrow or devotion. There is the solitary Muslim praying inside a textile mill in Bradford, England and a page full of veiled women at Friday prayer in Jakarta, Java. In an affecting contrast, one page juxtaposes women in Kashmir mourning and wailing over the death of a loved one, and a young Kashmiri peering from his hospital bed, his eyes wide with fear and worry.

Abbas has written affectingly in the first person about his travels through the Islamic world, and for those who wish to understand the passion, pain and enormity of Islam, this is a good place to start.

“When the Borders Bleed” by Ed Kashi is a more modest attempt to educate through photography. Obviously inspired by the ongoing struggle of the Kurds, Kashi documents the war victims, the refugees, the transplanted. Along with narrative by Christopher Hitchens, which includes a history and timeline of their long suffering, it includes some powerful work directed at a very narrow audience.

These three photographers, to their credit, were not interested in the sexy story. These three weren’t searching for celebrity but answering to a higher calling, truly trying to inform and educate.

ALLAH O AKBAR: A Journey Through Militant Islam, by Abbas (Phaidon/Chronicle Books: $60; 320 pp.)

HUMANITY AND INHUMANITY: The Photographic Journey of George Rodger, (Phaidon/Chronicle Books: $16.95; 176 pp.)

WHEN THE BORDERS BLEED: The Struggle of the Kurds, by Ed Kashi with Christopher Hitchens (Pantheon: $40; 140 pp.)