Who Will Crowdfund the Crowdfunder?

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

The crowdfunding platform Emphas.is has helped 60 photographers finance their personal projects and books over the past two years. Now, it is trying to help finance itself.

And how could Emphas.is raise money to expand its reach and help even more photographers? Through its own Emphas.is campaign.

The company’s founders, the husband-and-wife team of Karim Ben Khelifa and Tina Ahrens, are turning to the community of photographers it has nurtured. “We’ve run Emphas.is on a shoestring up until now,” Ms. Ahrens said. “Our company was built to be sustainable, but not necessarily to make a profit, so we are not attractive to most investors.”

Tamara Abdul Hadi Hisham, Lebanese. From the project “Picture an Arab Man,” in which Tamara Abdul Hadi photographed semi-nude Arab men of diverse backgrounds, hoping to combat stereotypes and highlight unexplored aspects of their identities.

Mr. Khelifa, a photographer whose work has been featured on Lens, added, “So that’s why the next logical step was to say to the community that obviously cares about what we are doing, ‘Lend us a helping hand to grow to the next stage.’ ”

They hope to raise at least $50,000 so they can support more projects, hire more staff and bring an enhanced experience to mobile platforms. The fund-raising, Ms. Ahrens said, is also a way to show donors “that people care, that they use Emphas.is and they are ready to back it up.”

Emphas.is started as a necessity for Mr. Khelifa, a veteran photojournalist, who saw assignments drying up for him and his friends in 2009. Few magazines were willing to pay for overseas coverage, and even fewer were interested in the in-depth stories he wanted to pursue. He decided that to survive in the profession, he had to solve the problem himself.

Introduced in 2011, the Emphas.is platform connects the people who want to tell hard-to-finance stories with the people who want to see them. Contributors subscribe to a project and receive rewards and updates from photographers in the field.

Emphas.is is not the first crowdfunding enterprise, and many photographers have raised money successfully on platforms like Kickstarter. But it is dedicated to documentary photography and visual storytelling, and it provides a closer and more active relationship between viewers and photographers, whose projects are screened by a board of reviewers.

“What we have going for us is that we are journalists and we are curated,” Ms. Ahrens said. “We keep within our ethics, and the quality of the work and the subject are very important.”

Laura El-Tantawy/VII Mentor Program In Egypt, Safeya Sayed Shedeed, the mother of a protester who was killed by police officers, wept as she waited to hear former President Hosni Mubarak’s sentencing. From the project “In the Shadow of the Pyramids.”

The success rate is also much higher than Kickstarter’s. Emphas.is finances 72 percent of its projects, while Kickstarter finances around 44 percent.

Lens has featured many stories that received funding through Emphas.is, including Matt Eich’s “The Seven Cities,” Andri Tambunan’s “Against All Odds,” Per-Anders Pettersson’s “Soweto,” Rian Dundon’s “Changsha” and Patrick Brown’s “Trading to Extinction.”

Originally, Emphas.is only financed projects that had not yet started or were partly finished. Last year, it expanded into crowdfunded books, finding that, by offering preordered copies or special editions, people could finance a book completely before it was published.

Emphas.is Publishing has begun to fill a void for photographers who can’t afford to pay publishers thousands of dollars to print their documentary and photojournalism projects. But the group’s main mission is still making sure that difficult, issue-oriented stories can be told. Emphas.is was created out of a combination of idealism and desperation. Even as the economic landscape has continued to change, it has proved that photographers can raise money for their personal projects.

Now it is time to see if photographers will help Emphas.is help photographers.

Neil Ever Osborne A green sea turtle breached the surface for a breath near Maui, Hawaii. From the project “Return of the Black Turtle.”

Follow @at_emphasis, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.