Like many readers, I have long appreciated Ken Williams's efforts to record triumph, pain, hope and despair through the photos he takes for the Concord Monitor. The paper recently reprinted an especially poignant image: a 1970s scene of a priest issuing last rites after a deadly car accident. Ken's commentary showed his sensitivity to the raw emotions of the moment: "My heart is pounding in my chest . . . the shutter seems to me to sound like a rifle shot. Some of the people turn to look at where the sound is coming from. Their expressions are not friendly."

Two days later, a woman wrote a letter to editor, chastising the Monitor for reprinting a photo that "does nothing but bring up past heartbreak to two families and a multitude of friends who loved these two young men."

To me, the question is not whether difficult photos should be shown to the public but whether the photos are underscoring a truth or exploiting a tragedy. In the past, the decision to allow a photo to run in a paper or a magazine was made by an editor who had the perspective of past decisions to use for guidance. In our current age of instant information dissemination, I fear the filtration system for news photographs will be cast aside.

I grew up with the tragic images of the shooting at Kent State, the napalm bombing of civilians near Trang Bang and the assassination of Robert Kennedy. I strongly believe photographs can teach lessons more powerfully than words. The Vietnam War was an abstraction to a 10-year-old girl, but when Life magazine ran page upon page of photos of the multitude of young men who had been killed in the span of one week, I became suddenly aware of the atrocity of war. Indeed, living a sheltered life in a small town, the tumult of the 1960s and '70s would have passed me by if I had not been exposed to the print media, which carried stark and often frightening images of the world beyond my doorstep.

The day after a reader asked the paper to be sensitive to personal past tragedy, another portrait of death ran in the Monitor, a photo of a young Iranian woman, Neda Aga Soltan, who was shot in the chest as she emerged from her car near an election protest. The picture was taken by Neda's boyfriend, a photojournalist, moments after she was assassinated; it was soon circulating on YouTube and Twitter.

Although I do not know if family permission was sought prior to the widespread distribution of this graphic photograph, I suspect many people saw the image before they had time to process the news of her demise.

The photo of Neda Aga Soltan eventually made its way to our own local paper. A Monitor editorial noted that Aga Soltan "is a face that Iran's failing leaders cannot hide from the rest of the world or, more important, from the Iranian people." Just as the photo of a young woman keening over the body of Jeffrey Miller at Kent State made our country aware of the raw violence of the college anti-war demonstrations, the photo of an innocent woman dead on the sidewalk may awaken Iranian moderates to the senselessness of extremism. Very often, stark images of tragedy inspire change.

While I support the long tradition of photojournalism, which had its beginnings with the stark Civil War images of Matthew Brady, what concerns me is the lack of editorial perspective applied to the internet posting of tragic news photos. Blogs and home pages are already filled with unfiltered images, but for the most part, mainstream news (and accompanying photographs) are still being edited and reviewed before they are posted. Digital cameras and cell phones facilitate the instant distribution of unauthorized and possibly painful images. Although anonymous photographs have always made their way into print, the publisher could ultimately be held accountable.

I wonder what sort of system of checks and balances will prevent unauthorized and unverified photographs of tragic events from being conveyed world-wide in a matter of minutes in our internet-based society.

The reader from Suncook was able to express her displeasure with the Monitor when it reprinted Ken Williams's photograph of a double fatality in Allenstown. How could the family of Neda Aga Soltan prevent her startling image, taken moments after she was fatally shot, from being posted on YouTube?

(Elaine P. Loft of Hopkinton is a community organizer and part-time historian.)