Wellcome Photography Prize 2025

The top 25 entries were selected for their creativity, narrative strength, and technical excellence by a diverse panel of international judges with submissions entered from all over the world. Entries spanned three categories: Striking solo photography, A storytelling series and The marvels of scientific and medical imaging.

The top 25 entrants will be awarded £1,000 with three category winners receiving £10,000. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on 16 July, with the top 25 being showcased in a major public exhibition at the Manby Gallery in the Francis Crick Institute, London, from 17 July to 18 October 2025.

This category celebrates the power of a single image to capture complex stories at the heart of health and humanity. This category asked imagemakers to distil vast, often emotional narratives into one frame—moments that provoke thought, challenge perceptions, and reveal hidden truths.

Whether exploring personal journeys through illness, documenting frontline medical work, or capturing the quiet resilience of communities, these images are united by their bold visual impact and rich storytelling.

This category showcases the extraordinary beauty and insight unlocked by advanced imaging technologies. From microscopic views of cellular structures to cutting-edge scans revealing the inner workings of the human body, these images blur the line between science and art.

Celebrating how tools like MRI, electron microscopy, and fluorescence imaging not only drive medical breakthroughs but also offer visually stunning perspectives on the world within us. The images invite you to see science not just as data, but as a source of wonder, elegance, and discovery.

This category honours the power of photography to build deeper, layered narratives around health, science, and lived experience. Through a sequence of images, photographers explore unfolding journeys—whether personal, communal, or global.

These series go beyond the single moment to reveal change, resilience, and the human spirit over time. Each collection invites you to engage with stories that are intimate yet universal, challenging us to see the connections between science and the lives it touches.

Nemo's Garden

Nemo’s Garden is the world’s first underwater greenhouse system, located in Liguria, Italy. It was created to research farming solutions for areas where growing plants may be challenging in the future. It has led to the discovery that plants grown in the biosphere contain higher levels of antioxidants than the same plants grown on land, which could be useful in the development of new medicines.

The Loss Mother's Stone

The series contains references to baby loss that some may find distressing.

Experiencing a stillbirth just weeks before a baby’s due date or a miscarriage at any point during a pregnancy causes unimaginable trauma for the parents. These powerful images by American photographer Nancy Borowick show mothers who have lost babies to stillbirth alongside images of significant items that represent the lost child. Borowick invited the women to share their stories and took their portraits as a way to document this loss, and to draw awareness to this subject, both for the general public and the medical community. 

Dream to Cure Water

Peru is home to the majority of the world’s tropical glaciers, but 40 per cent of their surface area has disappeared since the 1970s due to climate change. This series explores the health impacts of melting glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range, where this is threatening water supplies and contaminating rivers with the heavy metals that accumulate over centuries within glaciers.

I Spend 150 Hours Alone Each Week

Madeleine Waller took this series of portraits of her elderly mother, Margaret, at her rural home in Victoria, Australia. Madeleine lives in the UK, and they struggle with the emotional and physical distance between them. Her mother’s refusal to embrace new technology, such as a smartphone or email, makes it more difficult to communicate long distance. These photographs explore Margaret’s routines, including daily walks, gardening, crosswords, and the companionship she finds with a retired racehorse.

A Thousand Cuts

This project contains references to domestic abuse, which some may find distressing.

‘A Thousand Cuts’ studies the mental and physical trauma caused by domestic abuse within South Asian culture. Artist Sujata Setia, herself a survivor of domestic abuse, worked in close collaboration with the charity SHEWISE and a group of volunteers who participated in the project. These portraits depict the stories of these survivors as they chose to be seen, and after taking the photographs, Setia used the Indian paper-cutting technique sanjhi to maintain the women’s anonymity.