Julia Silverman Scully, editor of Modern Photography magazine for 20 years, died on July 18 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

She began working at photography magazines in the 1950s and was hired to be editor of Modern Photography in 1966. During her tenure, the magazine was instrumental in the emerging recognition of photography as art.

Ms. Scully was the project director of “The Family of Woman,” a 1979 book of pictures of women from around the world, for which she sifted through 300,000 photographs. It was a response to Edward Steichen’s popular book “The Family of Man,” which arose from a successful exhibition at the MOMA in 1955. She also wrote an acclaimed memoir about her Depression-era, hardscrabble childhood in Alaska.