NEW YORK, NY.- To Charles Biasiny-Rivera, who worked as a street photographer in the barrios of New York City in the early 1970s, his craft was a matter of trust as much as eye.

“You really do have to understand that when you enter a neighborhood, the neighborhood sees you as a stranger, because they know everybody, so you don’t want to become noticed,” he said in a 2022 video interview. “So you hang out a little bit,” he added, “smoke some cigarettes, say good morning, good afternoon to people.

“If you created a rapport with them,” he said, “they wouldn’t be peering at you all the time.” For those peeking from windows, “the shades would go up, the shades would go down.”

As an aspiring photographer of Puerto Rican descent, Biasiny-Rivera saw street photography as one of the few paths open to him at a time when the handful of Latino photographers he knew were struggling to make a mark in the field. He spent the rest of his career working to change that.

Biasiny-Rivera died at 93 on Aug. 10 at his home in Olivebridge, New York, a hamlet in the Catskill Mountains. His wife, Betty Wilde-Biasiny, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.

In 1974, Biasiny-Rivera helped found En Foco, a collective “devoted to documenting Latino life from the inside,” as Holland Cotter of The New York Times wrote in a review of the 2021 exhibition “En Foco: The New York Puerto Rican Experience, 1973-1974,” at El Museo del Barrio, a showcase of Latin American and Latino art in New York City. Biasiny-Rivera served as En Foco’s executive director for more than three decades.

Over the years, En Foco expanded its purview: It grew into a nonprofit organization that supports photographers and artists from a variety of underrepresented communities, and it has mounted exhibitions of socially conscious work in museums and galleries around the country.

In 1985, Biasiny-Rivera founded a new avenue for such artists to show off their work: Nueva Luz, a lush biannual magazine that has featured the work of photographers such as Carrie Mae Weems, Laura Aguilar, Delilah Montoya, Dawoud Bey and Sophie Rivera.

In 2004, he received the City of New York Mayor’s Award for Arts & Culture from Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Biasiny-Rivera exhibited his own work at the Smithsonian Institution, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and El Museo.

In the 1990s, he exhibited his mixed-media series “Messages From God,” which consisted of his photographs mounted alongside his own handwritten poetry, in the style of the prayer cards found throughout Latin America.

Still, it was his goal of developing the talent of others that really drove him, Bill Aguado, the longtime director of the Bronx Council on the Arts, said in an interview.

“If you had extraordinary work, Charlie was your advocate,” Aguado said. “He had a passion for it. When he started talking about these issues, you could see that glow in his eyes.”

Charles Biasiny-Rivera was born Nov. 10, 1930, on Roosevelt Island in New York City, the youngest of three children of Puerto Rican parents. His father, Nikolas Biasiny, was a merchant seaman, and his mother, Josefina (Rivera) Biasiny, worked in a factory.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1988, he is survived by their daughter, Amelia F. Biasiny; a stepdaughter, Nikola Biasiny Tule; and two grandchildren.

As a teenager growing up in the South Bronx, Charles got his first camera, a cheap plastic model, and taught himself to process film by reading library books on the subject.

He attended Metropolitan High School in the Bronx but left at 14 and later joined the National Guard. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1952; stationed in Korea during the war there, he honed his skills behind the lens working as a military photographer.

In 1990, he earned a bachelor’s degree in photography and Latin American studies from Empire State College (now University) in Saratoga Springs, New York, part of the State University of New York.

When he returned to New York City, he worked as a photography assistant, at one point setting up cameras, lenses and lighting for British photographer Cecil Beaton when he traveled to New York for shoots.

“He started in the early age when you had to mix your own chemicals,” Biasiny-Rivera said of Beaton in the 2022 interview, conducted by El Museo, “so he was aware of the process, but he didn’t care to be involved with it.” Beaton, he added, was more interested in charming the subjects, to calm them “so the muscles in the face would relax.”

Carving out a career for himself seemed more of a challenge. “I didn’t meet many other assistants, or photographers, that were Latinos,” Biasiny-Rivera said in a 2020 interview for En Foco. “When I did stumble across a few, we had a lot to talk about.”

He founded En Foco with his fellow photographers Roger Cabán and Felipe Dante, and the group would travel around the city in his Volkswagen bus mounting pop-up exhibitions in parks in Latino neighborhoods, particularly in the South Bronx and East Harlem.

As for their own work, early members divvied up areas of interest to cover that reflected the Latin American experience — one would concentrate on agricultural work, for example, and another on theater and dance. Biasiny-Rivera, however, preferred not to specialize.

“I didn’t want that,” he said. “I just wanted to roam and discover.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.