By: Joshua Dong

Julia Scully, who oversaw Modern Photography and wrote a book about her rough childhood, died on July 18 at age 94. Her death was confirmed by Jana Martin, a daughter of Julia Scully’s companion, Harold Martin, who is also a photographer.

Julia Scully’s childhood was a bumpy and winding road. Born on February 9, 1929, in Seattle, Julia Silverman’s life took a turn when she was living in San Francisco. Julia’s parents, Julius and Rose Silverman, had owned several failed businesses, so the Silverman family had financial trouble.

One day, Julia and her sister, Lillian, age 9, visited their parents’ coffee shop, which wasn’t doing very well. Their mother told them to go home and check to see if their father had returned from his doctor’s appointment. But when they got home, Julia and Lillian saw their father’s wooden leg propped against the wall and then the limp form of their father who had died from suicide.

Ms. Scully wrote later in “Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood” (1998) about her feelings after her father’s deaths, that “Nothing is said about how my father died, or even, in fact, that he is dead. He just disappeared, and I wasn’t really sure that he had ever been there in the first place.”

Mrs. Silverman tried to get along for two years, but ended up placing Julia and Lillian in an orphanage and went to the Alaskan wilderness on her own, running a tavern in Taylor Creek on the southern coast.

The girls eventually got reunited with their mother when they traveled on a boat together to Alaska in 1940. There, Julia, then known as Billie, got accustomed to Alaska, serving whisky in the tavern to gold miners and spending winters farther south in Nome.

Julia graduated high school in Nome and went to California to study creative writing at Stanford University, earning her bachelor’s degree in English in 1951. Trying to become a magazine writer, she attempted to join Sunset, a Bay Area magazine, but did not succeed in getting hired there. That was when she just “got on a train and went to New York,” she told Stanford magazine in 1999.

In New York she was secretary to the pictures’ editor at Argosy magazine, sparking her interest in photography. She later had two positions as editorial at U.S. Camera and Camera 35 before she got hired at Modern Photography in 1966. Ms. Julia Scully focused on the aesthetics side of photography, meaning she focused on showing the beauty of the pictures, although Modern Photography was just as devoted to the technical side as well, which was about the evolving camera and photo technologies.

Through Ms. Scully’s dedication to photography, the magazine was very influential in recognizing photography as art. She started Gravure, a section of the magazine that interviewed renowned photographers such as Irving Penn about the circumstances and thought that went into their pictures. Ms. Scully and her friend Peter Miller, a local newspaper editor, worked together on a book published in 1976 named, “Disfarmer: The Heber Springs Portraits, 1939-1946,” presenting 66 of Disfarmer’s photographs.

In an essay in Aperture magazine written the next year Ms. Scully wrote that there was a “conscious intent, rather than a naive artistry,” behind Mr. Disfarmer’s portraits, which led to him creating photographs with a “piercing clarity.” Her essay and book about Disfarmer led to increased popularity in Disfarmer’s photographs and photography in general.

Ms. Scully also directed the project “The Family of Woman,” a book published in 1979 for pictures of women from all around the world, also a retort to Edward Steichen’s popular book “The Family of Man”.

Her personal relationships, marriages to Edward Scully and Marvin Newman, both ended in divorce. Despite Julia Scully’s intense childhood and both her marriages breaking down, she lived a full life of photography and art, affecting others to a point where she is now credited as a major influencer in the developing art of photography.