Perched somewhere above a “We Buy Gold” joint and a Latin restaurant on Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx, a darkroom turned storage closet was once a repository for an almost overlooked visual history. It was an unlikely spot for an equally unlikely – and unrivaled – collection that now comprises 700 photographs by Latino, African-American and Asian photographers and other artists of color.

Such were the origins of the permanent collection of En Foco, which started as a Latino photographers’ group in 1974, when notions of community, art and ethnic pride fueled a movement that stood in defiance to the slights of the mainstream art world. Many of those groups have gone, victims of the vagaries of financing or the fickleness of curators, who might think the country is in a post-racial era.

Yet among its supporters, En Foco – where I worked after graduating from college in 1979 – continues to exist, though it long ago moved itself and its archives to offices at the Bronx Council on the Arts. It retains its mission to foster cultural diversity, encouraging up-and-coming photographers and challenging those who curate shows and publish books.

“It has a sense of history that is really great,” said Deborah Willis, chairwoman of the department of photography and imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “It’s not a post-racial world. I’m amazed when I attend exhibits, and I wonder: ‘Where are the points of view of others? Where are the other voices?’ This organization is important for curators, so many of whom don’t have the time to seek out and look for new names.”

An exhibition spanning several decades of work published in the group’s Nueva Luz magazine opens Tuesday at Sarah Lawrence College. Next month, a selection of Jaime Permuth’s work on the repair shops and scrapyards of Willets Point, in Queens, opens at the Pregones Theater in the Bronx. And in May, Ajira in Newark will host a show culled from the permanent collection.

Héctor Méndez Caratini

Miriam Romais, the group’s executive director since 2005, now hopes to bolster the collection through a federal grant, which will enable her to send it to other venues across the country. She is $15,000 shy of matching the $60,000 offered by the National Endowment of the Arts – not an easy task, given the competition for nonprofit financing.

“We got the grant around 2008, then the economy tanked,” she said. “But we’re keeping at it and not giving up. Like everything we do, you make it happen because you know the means will come.”

A similar ethos guided the group in its early days, when its members – Puerto Rican photographers whose roots were in New York – embraced the idea of bringing art to the community. Under the eventual leadership of Charles Biasiny-Rivera, they banded together, offering encouragement to each other and a challenge to the outside.

In some ways, they were doing what others were exploring elsewhere in the city.

“There were these pockets of people who looked for ways to be sure the arts were delivered to their own community as well as the larger community,” said Professor Willis, who fondly remembers similar efforts in Harlem. “We were all searching for ways to tell our stories, and these venues were available.”

As the group grew, it took on other activities: exhibitions at banks and libraries, classes in public schools and evening classes for adults (inside a plastic-walled darkroom equipped with enlargers by Leitz and Bessler and a workhorse of an Omega D3). By the mid-1980s, it entered a new phase with the decision to publish Nueva Luz, which would feature three photographers and a critical essay in each issue.

“At the time there were all these magazines like Interview that looked like flags. Big things,” said Frank Gimpaya, a photographer who came on board to handle graphic design duties. En Foco had other ideas, he said: “Let’s do it an image a page, none of this art direction splitting it up.”

In the pre-Internet era, the publication showcased the work of photographers who went on to wider acceptance and success. And its growing schedule of exhibitions brought attention to photographers who by now were not just Latinos. Among those who have shown or been published are Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, Larry McNeil, Lola Flash and Sama Alshaibi. (Click here to download the latest issue of the magazine.)

Mr. Bey, who now teaches in Chicago, says En Foco exists alongside the mainstream institutions because it is as important. He said that it – and like-minded curators – highlight work long before the mainstream.

“I can’t say the mainstream has a problem acknowledging photographers of color,” Mr. Bey said in an e-mail message. “The mainstream has problems acknowledging work of substance by a whole lot of people. Part of it is continuing institutional ignorance. And another part of it has to do with the narrowness of discourse within the art world at any given moment, a narrowness which excludes a large range of work.”

That’s where the permanent collection comes in. Started almost as an afterthought when artists who had been in various En Foco shows donated prints, it has now become a resource with few equals in the United States, said Elizabeth Ferrer, who curated the traveling exhibition based on it. She sees it as a history that has been hidden from traditional accounts.

She singles out as an example the work of Luis Carlos Bernal, whose 1970s photos were brought to the attention of people on the East Coast when he participated in En Foco’s “La Familia” show at El Museo del Barrio.

“Luis Carlos Bernal was really self-consciously the first Chicano photographer,” said Ms. Ferrer, the director of contemporary art at BRIC Arts in Brooklyn. “What he said very emphatically was, ‘I’m making this work for the people I photograph.’ For the first time it was not an outsider, exploitative or exotic view of culture. It was a completely intimate and insider view.”

A lot of the work En Foco championed in its early years had that documentary bent, exemplified by the images of Phil Dante, George Malave and Frank X. Méndez. Ms. Ferrer said there was a shift in the 1980s, when the work embraced not just color but also staged and constructed images, which would become commentaries on identity and the medium. More recently, she said, there has been a return to more documentary digital work.

Luis Delgado

Jaime Permuth is one who has embraced that tradition. In recent years, Mr. Permuth, who is originally from Guatemala and now works at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, photographed the immigrants who toil in a grimy stretch of Willets Point, among the scrapyards in the shadow of Citi Field. In some ways, he could relate to them.

“Having grown up in Guatemala in a small Jewish community, I always felt a double identity,” he said. “In Israel, I’m part of the diaspora that does not speak Hebrew. In the U.S., I come here and have to start over again.”

Which is why he connected with En Foco when he arrived in New York in 1991.

“En Foco was an obligatory stop for a Latino photographer in New York,” he said. “It was the place where you did not feel so anonymous. You come here already feeling disconnected. You want a group of people who understand you, support you and you can identify with.”