That is exactly what Damon Winter told me. He is the Times photographer who took the pictures that elicited most of the protests to me and much praise on the paper’s Web site. Winter, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his coverage of the Obama presidential campaign, was the first Times staff photographer on the scene, flying from New York to the Dominican Republic and then into Haiti aboard a chartered helicopter. He had never been to Haiti or covered a natural disaster.

“I have had so many people beg me to come to their home and photograph the bodies of their children, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers,” he said. “There are so many times that I have to apologize and say that I cannot, that I have photographed so many bodies already, and I think it breaks their hearts because they so desperately want people to know what has happened to them, what tremendous pain they are in, and that they desperately need help.” Winter said it was important “that I do whatever I can to try and make our readers understand just how dire the situation is here.”

Jessie De Witt, an international photo editor, said Winter sent the paper 26 pictures on his first day in Haiti, including the picture of the bodies along the curb that wound up on the front page. He sent 65 the next day, including the mourning father and the dead man on the stretcher. De Witt and her colleagues think carefully about photo selections. A picture of a dog eyeing a corpse is out, as are stacks of bodies without context. And they think about juxtaposition: an Armageddon-like scene of people scrambling for supplies from a ruined store was played against a quieter picture of people waiting patiently for medical treatment.

Michele McNally, the assistant managing editor in charge of photography, said she was going through all the photos from all sources, and Winter’s photos of the single dead man and the grieving father “stopped me in my tracks.” Bill Keller, the executive editor, said editors considered both for the front page, but chose the lone body, played big, because it was dramatic and there was “an intimacy that causes people to pause and dwell on the depth of the tragedy.” Looking at one person, instead of many, “humanizes it,” he said.

I asked McNally about Robbins’s contention that such pictures would not appear in the paper if the victims were somewhere in the United States. If such pictures existed, she said, she would run them. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, The Times did publish a front-page picture of a body floating near a bridge where a woman was feeding her dog. But despite Katrina’s toll, there were relatively few such images in the paper. Irby said that authorities in the United States are generally quick to cordon off disaster scenes.

Just as a picture of a grieving mother told the story of the tsunami in 2004, the disturbing images of the last two weeks have been telling the story of Haiti, and The Times is right to publish them. As Patricia Lay-Dorsey, a reader from Detroit, put it, Winter’s “camera was my eye as much as it was his. And every one of his photos told the truth.”