Rashid Bilimoria
MFA ’25 Photography
In my work I juxtapose architectural and landscape imagery to make symbolic connections between land, materiality and power. I visited stone quarries and gravel pits in Vermont, including an abandoned marble quarry high up on a forested hillside. Materials from these sites were used to build some of the iconic buildings at Harvard and MIT including the white-marbled Harvard Medical School, MIT’s Great Dome and the modernist Carpenter Center. These structures with their imposing facades serve as physical containers for institutional power and privilege. To quote Friedrich Nietzsche: “In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power assume visible form.”
For my final review project titled ‘Monolithic’ I visually explore the concepts of excavation and exclusion. Structures that are expected to be grand and inspiring function as authoritarian and inaccessible, while the excavated landscape appears aesthetically charged in uncanny ways.
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Rashid Bilimoria is a photographer who lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife Kimberlee, 17 year old twins Meadow and Peyson and chocolate labrador Lily. He is a second year MFA student in photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, graduating in May, 2025. Rashid shoots both digital and analog and works primarily in black and white. His studio practice is focused on landscape and architectural photography, and he photographs both in the United States and Asia.
