(CNN) -- The photographer who took the picture of a man about to be fatally struck by a New York subway car said Thursday that he did so in a desperate attempt to alert the driver of the train to stop. "From where I was, I could have screamed my lungs out; probably nobody would have heard it," R. Umar Abbasi told CNN's Anderson Cooper about the incident Monday in which 58-year-old Ki-Suck Han had been shoved onto the tracks in a Times Square station as a train approached. "The only way, I thought at that moment, was to start clicking away, releasing the shutter that will fire the flash, and make him aware that this is an unusual occurrence -- why is there a burst of light hitting him -- and catch Mr. Han on the track."
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NEW: "I would have said, 'Mr. Han, run the other direction,'" photographer says
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"I had no idea what I was shooting," the photographer writes in a New York Post piece
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A media critic calls the photo "profit-motive journalism at its worst"
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The image shows a man moments before he's struck by a subway train
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