Top 25 Announced for Wellcome Photography Prize 2025

• The Wellcome Photography Prize celebrates astonishing visual stories that reframe how health and science are experienced, represented and understood.
• This year saw submissions from over 100 countries, offering a breadth of perspectives on health and science from around the world.
• Finalists explore subjects ranging from personal experiences of disease, to pioneering subaquatic farming projects and microscopic views of a butterfly brain mid-metamorphosis, to the social exclusion that can accompany old age.
• This year also marks the return of a Biomedical Imaging category, continuing the legacy of the Wellcome Image Awards (1997–2018).
• Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on 16 July 2025, ahead of the opening of a free, public exhibition at the Francis Crick Institute in London, which will run from 17 July – 18 October 2025.
• The exhibition will also feature Things We Left Unseen, a participatory photography project developed by South African non-profit Eh!woza with young people from the township of Khayelitsha.

The Wellcome Photography Prize has unveiled its Top 25 entries, selected for the 2025 edition of the awards. Showcasing powerful images that meet experiences of urgent global health challenges head on, the prestigious prize highlights the vital role visual storytelling plays in creating a healthier future.

This year’s image-makers explore subjects at all scales of life: from the first non-invasive image of microplastics beneath the skin, and surprisingly beautiful pollution particles collected from Brixton in South London, to the remote Peruvian Andes, where Indigenous farmers are blending ancestral knowledge with modern science to address water contamination.

Formerly known as the Wellcome Image Awards, the Wellcome Photography Prize has a 28-year legacy of championing image-makers who bring health, science and medicine to life. The prize is open to all, and this year received submissions from over 100 countries, offering a breadth of perspectives from around the world. The Top 25 entries feature over 30 individuals from 18 countries, spanning Bangladesh, Brazil, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Myanmar, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Uganda, the UK, USA and beyond.

The 2025 judging panel brings together leading voices in photography and science, including:

• Melanie Keen (Chair), Director, Wellcome Collection
• Esmita Charani, Associate Professor at University of Cape Town
• Helen Fisher, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at King’s College London
• Noah Green, Beautiful Biology initiative at Howard Hughes Medical Institute
• Caroline Hunter, Picture Editor at the Guardian Saturday Magazine
• Mark Lythgoe, Founder and Director of UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging
• Benjamin Ryan, independent journalist covering science and healthcare
• Elizabeth Wathuti, multi-award-winning global environmentalist and young African climate leader
• Daniella Zalcman, Photographer and Founder of Women Photograph

Melanie Keen, Chair of the Judging Panel and Director of Wellcome Collection, said: 

“The final selection of images is a powerful testament to the role photography can play in making health and science visible. From deeply personal portraits to scientific imaging, the selected works reflect the complexity of modern life and the intersections between climate, mental health and infectious disease. These images don’t just inform, they move us, and in many cases, call us to act.”

The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on 16 July 2025. The three category winners (Striking Solo Photography; A Storytelling Series; and The Marvels of Scientific and Medical Imaging) will each receive £10,000, with all other finalists awarded £1,000. The Top 25 will be presented at the Wellcome Photography Prize 2025 exhibition at the Francis Crick Institute in London from 17 July – 18 October 2025. Admission is free and open to all.

Themes and Highlights

The Wellcome Photography Prize 2025 presents powerful photography that can impact the ways in which health is represented and understood. Exploring overlooked experiences in areas like psychiatric care, biomedical innovation, climate migration, and the daily realities of disability, this year’s entrants have utilised a wide range of techniques including portraiture, documentary photography, cyanotypes, drone imagery, photoacoustic imaging and different types of microscopy.

Some of the most quietly powerful images explore ageing and the emotional terrain of later life. In I Spend 150 Hours Alone Each Week, Madeleine Waller photographs her mother navigating daily life in rural Australia. Her portraits are full of stillness and tenderness, capturing daily rituals: a crossword, a walk to feed a retired racehorse, her quiet companionship with a house spider. Each image reflects the emotional depth of her attachment to home, to memory, and to her personal routines. In Transparent Curtains, Oded Wagenstein captures Mordechai Zilberman sat wearing his late partner Aryeh’s clothes, holding a flower-decorated mask. After sixty years together, Aryeh’s death left Mordechai in deep grief. When he later moved into a nursing home, he concealed his sexuality out of fear of rejection. Part of a wider series exploring the experiences of LGBTQ+ elders, the image speaks to the profound loneliness and exclusion that can accompany old age, especially when seeking care and community.

Two projects confront pain that is often hidden or minimised. In Self, Five Years On, Georgie Wileman presents a stark self-portrait showing the surgical scars left by her battle with endometriosis, a condition that affects one in ten women and those assigned female at birth, yet remains underdiagnosed and underfunded. Her image is raw, confrontational and impossible to ignore. The Loss Mother’s Stone by Nancy Borowick offers sensitive insight into the experience of stillbirth. Photographing mothers alongside objects that symbolise the children they lost, she creates space for stories that are rarely told.

The emotional resonance of these stories expresses the lived experiences of patients undergoing treatment. With his head wrapped in gauze and electrodes trailing from his scalp, in Stereo EEG Self-Portrait, Muir Vidler captures himself mid-treatment for a form of epilepsy that cannot be supported by medication. The portrait is matter-of-fact, even clinical, yet it pulses with vulnerability. In The Light Will Come, Dora Grivopoulou captures shafts of coloured light emerging through an open door inside Dafi, a former psychiatric hospital in Athens. For Grivopoulou, the doorway is a threshold between confinement and freedom, and the light becomes a symbol of hope, something that transcends physical and psychological barriers.

Many of the Prize’s photographers explore the profound consequences of climate change on health, while also documenting how people adapt with creativity and resilience. In A Dream to Cure Water, Ciril Jazbec follows Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Andes as they purify contaminated glacial runoff using aquatic plants and basic scientific tools. His photographs are both poetic and urgent, portraying a community on the frontline of environmental collapse who are finding solutions rooted in ancestral knowledge. Giacomo d’Orlando’s Nemo’s Garden offers a vision of the future: the world’s first underwater greenhouse, where crops grow without soil and contain greater antioxidants than the same plants grown on land.

In Urban Travel, Mithail Afrige Chowdhury captures a rooftop in Dhaka, where close to half of the population are climate migrants. Here, a mother stages a picnic for her daughter who longs to experience nature - a quiet act of resistance and imagination. Searching for Life by Sandipani Chattopadhyay takes us to a parched riverbed in West Bengal, where villagers dig through dry earth to collect the last traces of water. In Beautiful Disaster, Alexandru Radu Popescu offers a different kind of landscape: a toxic lake in Romania, created by copper mine runoff, that has swallowed the former village of Geamăna. In 1977, 1,000 inhabitants were forcibly evacuated so that toxic waste could be stored here. Nonetheless, seen from above, it is eerily beautiful, with swirls of red and gold in poisoned water.

Several photographers challenge how we see health, disability and identity. Resilience Artist by Pyaephyo Thetpaing shows a craftsman in Myanmar painting and carving using only his left foot, having lost his other limbs. His portrait is a powerful image of purpose and pride. In Musa, Marijn Fidder documents a man in Uganda who contracted polio as a child. His story, told in his own words, reframes the lived experience of disability and his right to be seen.

This year also marks the return of a Biomedical Imaging category, continuing the legacy of the Wellcome Image Awards (1997–2018). These images, produced in labs and research centres around the world, offer a glimpse into life at the smallest scales and into research that could transform our future. In Microplastics in Mammalian Tissue, P. Stephen Patrick and Olumide Ogunlade reveal the first non-invasive image of plastic particles embedded in living tissue, captured using a pioneering photoacoustic laser technique. In Cholesterol in the Liver, Steve Gschmeissner shows crystals forming inside cells, microscopic shapes with life-threatening consequences. Organoids by Oliver Meckes and Nicole Ottawa presents lab-grown uterine tissue, tiny structures that may one day replace the need for animal testing.

These works sit alongside others that blend artistry and scientific precision. In Brixton Road, Marina Vitaglione transforms London air pollution into ghostly cyanotypes, making the invisible tangible. Jander Matos and Joaquim Nascimento’s Submarine Fever depicts a mosquito egg in vivid detail, highlighting how warming climates accelerate the spread of disease.

Things We Left Unseen: Youth Storytelling in South Africa

Things We Left Unseen, a participatory photography project developed by Cape Town-based non-profit Eh!woza in partnership with Wellcome, will also be on display alongside the Top 25 entries at the Wellcome Photography Prize exhibition.

Eh!woza is a pioneering public engagement organisation that brings together young people, creative media and biomedical science to challenge stigma and promote health equity in high HIV and TB burden communities. Seventeen young people from Khayelitsha participated in image-making workshops exploring health, daily life and well-being in their community. Their photographs and personal texts offer a youth-led view of issues including mental health, water access, sanitation, housing and environmental change. These stories speak to the resilience, pride and everyday challenges of life in one of South Africa’s most dynamic and complex townships.