Molly Katharine Greenleaf (née Thrailkill) is graduate of the Visual Studies PhD program at the University of California, Irvine. Her areas of research include the history and theory of photography, American art and visual culture, and new media.
Her dissertation, titled The Axe and the Lens: Photography and the Big Trees of the American West 1860-1920, frames both photography and the deliberate felling of trees as analogous human interventions that make trees both historical and knowable. The process of rendering the tree inert, both through logging as well as through the act of photography, necessarily entails the transformation of the tree from living entity to commodity, from tree to lumber, but also from referent to image. As such, this project investigates the critical entanglement of wonderment and exploitation present in photography and logging of the big trees.
While completing her academic degrees in art history and visual studies, Dr. Greenleaf has also held diverse roles in finance and business management. Currently, she is part of the accounting team at Homewood Mountain Resort on Lake Tahoe’s West Shore.
Education
PhD | Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine | Irvine, CA
Fall 2017 to Fall 2023
MA | History of Art
The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU | New York, NY
Fall 2014 to Spring 2017
BA | Art & Art History and French
Colgate University | Hamilton, NY
Fall 2005 to Spring 2009
HONORS & AWARDS
2019 | Outstanding Art History TA Award
2017 | Master’s thesis passed with distinction
2009 | Colgate University Award for Excellence in French
2009 | Gamma Sigma Alpha National Greek Academic Honor Society
2009 | Colgate University Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence
2008 | Colgate University Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence
2007 | Colgate University Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence
2006 | Colgate University Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence
2005 | Phi Eta Sigma National Honor Society for First-Year Students
Teaching
Lecturer | Art of Ancient Greece & Rome
University of California, Irvine | Irvine, CA
Summer 2020
Teaching Assistant | Art History
University of California, Irvine | Irvine, CA
Fall 2018 to Spring 2021
Teaching Assistant | Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine | Irvine, CA
Spring 2020
Teaching Assistant | History
University of California, Irvine | Irvine, CA
Fall 2019
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Payroll Specialist
Homewood Mountain Resort | Homewood, CA
January 2024 to present
Accounting Coordinator
Homewood Mountain Resort | Homewood, CA
April 2022 to January 2024
Business Director
artnet Auctions | New York, NY
July 2015 to August 2016
Business Manager
artnet Auctions | New York, NY
January 2013 to July 2015
Volunteer
The Morgan Library | New York, NY
April 2011 to February 2012
Photographs Cataloguer
artnet Auctions | New York, NY
February 2011 to January 2013
Intern
artnet Auctions | New York, NY
October 2010 to February 2011
Intern
Lori Bookstein Fine Art | New York, NY
October 2009 to August 2010
Intern
Blue Medium | New York, NY
October 2009 to March 2010
Intern
Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University | Hamilton, NY
Fall 2008 to Spring 2009
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
The Axe and the Lens: Photography and the Big Trees of the American West 1860-1920
The massive trees of the American West — sequoia, redwood, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and cedar trees — bear a particular and critical relationship to photography. This project argues that the relationship of photography to the Big Trees is anything but passive; that is, photography benefits from, effects, and perpetuates violent human interference with these trees. In turn, these interventions allow for the tree to be successfully represented within the photographic frame. While these operations are most explicit within the context of logging in the Pacific Northwest, even under the mantle of preservation, trees and groves are frequently altered to drive visitation, and to foster extraordinary pictorial environments for tourist snapshots.
This project’s historical span, the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, marked a period of momentous historic transition; the rapid industrialization of the American landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in turn transformed early American visual and political culture. This period, which saw substantial efforts to profit from and effectively conquer the American forests, also sustained several key synchronicities and seemingly contradictory encounters with the tree, not limited to the confrontation between the Puritanical drive to civilize and clear the American wilderness against Romantic attitudes that found moral and religious value in the same.
This dissertation project stands in between the camera’s lens and the Big Tree as subject and explores the rich contradictions that emerge from the historical confrontation between mechanical reproduction and the botanical. The first chapter charts the formation of a highly specific portrait type that developed out of logging operations in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the century. The second chapter of this project examines the significant material afterlife of felled trees, from the Big Trees that were transported East to the World’s Fairs, to the forests that were cleared to produce the very networks of rail transportation that allowed for the movement of these trees. The third chapter concerns photography’s role in the preservation of California’s Big Trees.
Even if this project is primarily concerned with photographic production over a roughly sixty-year span from the 1860s through the beginning of the nineteenth century, there is a particular timeliness and contemporary relevance to these images. The same challenges of visual representation of the Big Trees exist today, even if they are now met with new computer design technologies and digital media that push beyond the possibilities of the two-dimensional photographic frame.
