Wellcome Photography Prize 2025

Urban Travel depicts a mother and daughter on a rooftop picnic in Dhaka. With few parks left in the city due to rapid urbanisation, this staged moment, a simple attempt to give a child a taste of nature, becomes an act of creativity amidst the reality of climate migration.

Cholesterol in the Liver reveals cholesterol crystals forming inside lipid-laden liver cells. These microscopic shifts, invisible to the naked eye, can have deadly consequences: when cholesterol hardens from liquid to crystal, it damages blood vessels and contributes to heart disease and strokes.

A Thousand Cuts is a deeply collaborative portrait project developed with survivors of domestic abuse within South Asian communities. Each image is a composite of personal testimony, visual symbolism, and traditional craft.

The winners were chosen 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 entries are on display 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.

Winner - Urban Travel by Mithail Afrige Chowdhury

Nuraine and her mother live in the city of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Nuraine wanted to have the experience of eating a picnic outside in nature, but due to rapid urbanisation, there are very few parks or green spaces left. Nuraine’s mother decided to recreate a “nature experience” on the roof of their apartment building. One of the reasons people are moving into cities is because of the increase in extreme weather events and natural disasters, particularly affecting Bangladesh.

Every day 2,000 climate migrants take up permanent residence in Dhaka, and they now comprise close to half of the total population. This is causing infrastructure challenges for the city. Mithail Afrige Chowdhury, a local photographer, draws our attention to this tender scene and contrasts it with the reality of urban expansion visible around them, asking us to consider the impacts of climate change on residents’ daily lives.

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.

Winner - Cholesterol in the Liver by Steve Gschmeissner

The liver is the organ that both produces and manages the levels of cholesterol in the body. This image is of cholesterol crystals (blue) within a lipid-laden liver cell (purple) taken from a human liver. When cholesterol changes from a liquid to a crystal, it can build up in the circulatory system and cause blood-vessel damage, leading to heart attacks and strokes.

Steve Gschmeissner, a scientific photographer, created the image using a technique called electron microscopy, which can visualise extremely small structures with very high resolution. Colouring of the resulting image highlights the different structures within the image. Detailed images such as these can support scientists and the public to better understand more about the effects of cholesterol on the body. 

Image technique: False-coloured scanning electron microscopy.
Scale: Width of the lipid droplet is 12 micrometres.

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.

Winner - A Thousand Cuts by Sujata Setia

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.

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.