Wellcome Photography Prize 2025 audio tour

This audio stop was written by the photographer Georgie Wileman. Unfortunately Georgie was not well enough to record it, so it is read by me, Laurie Britton Newell, one of the curators of the exhibition.

 My name is Georgie Wileman. I am a London based photographer, filmmaker and spoken word poet. My work focuses on underrepresented stories in the media. I am also the head of ‘This Is Endometriosis’, a global movement working towards validation, representation and education about endometriosis.

 This is a photograph called Self, 5 Years On, 2014 to 2022.   It is an assisted self-portrait. The  picture is taken from above and in it I am lying on a white sheet, only my torso and arms are visible. I am wearing a small black tank top that reveals my stomach and the bottom of my rib cage, and black underwear that is being pulled lower with one of my thumbs. My other hand and arm rest on the other side of my torso, showing a circle outline tattoo on my arm. The viewer can see what is drawn across my stomach and lower abdomen.

The years 2014 to 2022 are hand written in black ink on my skin and black lines in the same pen connect the dates. There are 13 places where dates are written, when they’re all connected it makes the shape of the outline of a heart, but all jutted and broken around the edges. It kind of resembles a map with coordinates, or a marked out constellation. Each date is beside a small scar from endometriosis related surgeries, some have healed white, while fresher scars are still pink. Each date represents the year the scar was opened and for many of the scars, then reopened, and reopened. 

The scar that has the most dates beside it is inside my belly button where there are seven dates listed for all seven of my surgeries between 2014 and 2022.  The photograph is from the series This Is Endometriosis, this is the second time I have taken this self portrait, the first photograph was taken five years and two operations ago, it was titled, 2014 to 2017.

I never thought I would take more than one of this photograph, but despite wishing I never had to, they are even louder as a pair. 

The ‘This Is Endometriosis’ work was made for many reasons, but with this image in particular, it’s my way to protest. The endometriosis community is being let down by our medical systems, not just in the UK but all over the world.

The disease is dangerously underfunded, under-research and misinformed. What little information we do know about endometriosis is not held by the vast majority of healthcare professionals, with basic misunderstanding about endometriosis and its true impact deeply ingrained and wide spread.

Time and time again people with endometriosis will seek help when they’re in pain worse than childbirth, only to be told our pain is not real, that we make it up for attention, or worse, that we’re addicted to pain medication and treated as such.  We are so often blamed for our pain in one way or another, a lifelong cycle of gaslighting and medical malpractice. 

Endometriosis is lesions that grow and bleed inside your body, it has been found on every organ including the brain, heart and skin. The resulting damage is organs pulled out of place, fused together or destroyed completely, the pain so intense that a BBC study in the UK found that 50% of those with the disease had contemplated suicide.

This is endometriosis! This is what it looks like, and it’s not good enough!  We need change, we deserve the chance to live a life without agony. 1 in 10 women and people assigned female at birth face this fight and most of us feel alone in it, if you are one of us, I promise you you’re not. Keep holding on, keep fighting, one day at a time, you’re not on your own.

Hello, my name is Muir Vidler and I am a photographer based between London and Edinburgh. This is a picture I took in 2023 that I’ve titled ‘Stereo EEG, Self-Portrait’. 

I mostly take pictures of people, portraits and reportage. Sometimes on assignments for publications like the Sunday Times Magazine and the New York Times Magazine, and other times on personal projects that document people and their stories around the world that I find interesting.

 So I’ve photographed a mix of people, sometimes celebrities and often not. I like to find opportunities to capture people doing something striking, personal and real - interesting people doing something characterful. This is a self-portrait. I don’t usually take pictures of myself, but I don’t often look this interesting!

In this picture you can see my head and shoulders in semi-profile. What is striking is that I have a medical bandage wrapped around my head and chin, and there are wires running out the back of the bandage across my chest and shoulders and then into a machine that is out of frame. It looks really weird, kind of like something from a science fiction film. They’re multi-coloured wires and they contain electrodes to do a medical procedure called Stereo EEG, so I took this self-portrait while I was in hospital for that.

The Stereo EEG is a procedure where electrodes are inserted deep into the brain to record what is happening during an epileptic seizure. It’s a test for people who have been having seizures for a while and haven’t responded to any medical treatment. And it will help to determine if they are potential candidates to receive brain surgery.  I have focal seizures, so I’m lucky not to lose consciousness, but as it hasn’t responded to medicine this was the next step. 

 So I had to be in the hospital for seven days and I took this picture on day five. I was lucky to be in a room with nice daylight, so I am sitting in a chair next to the bed with the hospital wall as a backdrop, the window providing daylight so I didn't need to use any lights, and the camera on a tripod with a remote control shutter release in my hand.

 Living with epilepsy is more complicated than I thought it was before I started having seizures about 15 years ago. Many people have terrible seizures and I’m pretty lucky that the ones I get aren’t so bad. What happens with my seizures is that for a few minutes I lose my awareness, but not consciousness, and afterwards I’m OK. But the more complicated side is that epilepsy usually has an effect on people’s cognitive functioning. The common problem being that it can make your memory not so good.  So i am lucky to be living in the smartphone society now, so I use apps that will pop up reminders on my phone about important things, and I also do things like keep a daily diary.  I’m lucky that I do photography for a job so I’ve got tons of photos from the last few years!

 Like a lot of people I was born and lived a long time without having epilepsy, but then I just started to get seizures. Since I was diagnosed I’ve read a lot more about it and while it’s not a pleasant condition to have it is very interesting. It makes me think that there can’t be many careers more interesting than being a neurologist. We know so little about how the brain works and it’s got to be one of the most interesting things on our planet. 

Everyone with epilepsy will have a unique story to tell. There are common threads, symptoms and feelings that people have, but everyone will have their own story about it too. One big difference is what part of your brain the seizures are happening in. It can  cause certain feelings and you can find people that experience fear, some that feel ecstatic - all sorts. 

 It’s a hard condition to document with stills photography. There are medical conditions that have a big impact on how people look or move, and I’ve seen those documented with photography. I had thought about documenting epilepsy before but didn’t know how. So when I knew I’d be sitting in a hospital covered in bandages with wires sticking out my brain for 7 days with nothing to do it made me feel pretty optimistic about getting a good, relevant self-portrait. And I was lucky to be in a room with good daylight and plain white walls. 

It felt quite satisfying to turn the camera on myself. I’ve only done self-portraits  2 or 3 times before, and the photos that I liked weren’t really the favourites of my friends or family. They thought I looked too serious in them. I am not sure why… and I look pretty serious in this one I suppose, but that goes with the environment and setting quite well. Something that stands out quite a lot in a good photo can be something pretty small when compared to all the other similar photos from the same shoot. I chose this portrait when I was editing because of the angle of my head and direction of my eyes.  I’m not looking directly in the camera but I’m not looking too far to the side either, and combined with my expression that made it work for me. That wasn’t something I planned exactly but then most of my good portraits have something that I didn’t plan.

I set out to be a photojournalist by doing a post-graduate diploma in it, and I wanted to travel to interesting places and events and take lots of different photos. But I ended up doing a series of portraits on that course and they were published in different magazines and they started to commission me to do more. I still do photojournalism but I just love taking portraits. Even if it's a self portrait with wires sticking out of my head.

Hello my name is Steve Gschmeissner. I am a scientific photographer, or to be more precise I’m a scanning electron microscopist. This means that I am an expert in taking images of very small things often that are not visible with a normal microscope. By small things I mean cells, bacteria and viruses for example.

I started my career working at The Royal College of Surgeons, and later Cancer Research UK but retired early to work as a free-lance scientific photographer, collaborating with scientists, undertaking commissions, and working with musicians, artists and even fashion designers.

In this image there is a group of crystal-like structures in the centre. They are turquoise and a darker blue in colour. They look like sea urchins! The crystals sit within a circular recess surrounded by an uneven surface that is purple in colour and resembles a satellite image of the surface of a planet.

My image is called ‘Cholesterol in the Liver’ because that is exactly what it illustrates. Cholesterol is very important in the body. When it 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.

This image, from a liver sample, shows the cholesterol crystals within a single red liver cell surrounded by normal liver cells coloured purple. This is unusual because normally these crystals are hidden from view by surrounding lipids or fats in the liver cells. The reason these are so visible here is because, in this 30 year old sample, the lipids were dissolved during recent processing to reveal the crystals under the scanning electron microscope .

Scanning electron microscopy or SEM is ideal for scientific photography as it produces a three dimensional image that is easier to interpret for scientists and relate to for the general public. Because electrons not light are used to produce the image they are black and white and are later coloured to make them easier to understand or more visual, and artistic.

My aim as a photographer is to make scientific images available not just to scientists but also to the general public. The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” has never been more appropriate than when applied to science.

Hello my name is Sujata Setia and I am an artist and photographer originally from India and now based in the UK. I am self taught, and before establishing my artistic practice I had a career in journalism. I initially started out as a portrait photographer, taking family portraits, but after I lost my mother, my practice became more autobiographical and also socially engaged. I wanted to find universal resonance for my personal grief and the trauma I have from growing up in a home with domestic abuse.

This work is called ‘“मुझसे मुलाकात”“ or ‘Finding Me’. It is part of a series called ‘A Thousand Cuts’- that studies patterns of Domestic Abuse within the South Asian Culture.  It is a framed photograph that has intricate cut letters across the surface of it. In the center of the photograph a woman stands facing the viewer in front of a dark backdrop. She is wearing a Dupattā or long beaded scarf that covers her head and hangs below her knees. The scarf is red, green and orange and beneath she is wearing a red Kurta or traditional South Asian tunic,  and dark blue denim trousers. She has bare feet. 

Urdu words have been cut out across the surface of the image and cover her. The woman’s face is obscured by a cut out star. The cut out text on top of the image is a diary entry written by the woman herself on the day she left the home of her perpetrator. She writes "Surely God is Merciful. For the first time in this world, God has given me the right to live my life as per my wish and decision.  I can choose what I like to do, what I like to wear... all of these choices are finally coming from me. Now I find everything in the world to be beautiful and light is felt everywhere. Now I can quickly find light in the darkness. I have started liking red again. Whereas, my husband most disliked me by wearing red lehenga and red lipstick. After that I gave up on the red colour. But now I will never sacrifice myself and my wishes for anyone in this life. Never, ever." 

Where the incisions have been made they reveal a red background beneath. In this work, red is more than just a colour. In South Asian culture, red is used in celebrations like weddings, but it is also the colour of blood, of pain, of urgency, and of rage. It shows the complexity of culture and how something sacred for one person can be a form of control or harm for another.

‘A Thousand Cuts’ started as a way to face my personal history. I didn’t want to make work about domestic abuse in the way it’s often seen- flattened, turned into statistics, or reduced to a single label. I wanted to honour the unique lived experiences of the survivors. So I partnered with Shewise, a charity in the UK run by two sisters who are themselves survivors. They work closely with South Asian and Middle Eastern women, supporting them to rebuild their lives. I shared my endeavour with them - not as a polished project, but as a heartfelt need. I told them: this may never reach a big audience, but I want to document the deep, lasting impact that abuse has across generations.

Shewise connected me with a group of women. We met in a quiet room inside a church in Hounslow. There was no written contract. Just an unspoken understanding - a shared respect. We sat together for hours, over many sessions, simply talking. Some women left their stories in that room and chose not to return. Others stayed and walked this journey with me.

Those who joined the project had one-on-one conversations with me. We spoke about their lives - childhood, relationships, and their emotions now. I asked questions like: Where in your body do you feel all of this pain? Each one of them responded in their own words with something similar: “If you cut me open, all you’ll see are bleeding wounds.”

That metaphor became central to the work. I photographed each woman and, together, we created a visual idea inspired by her life. I then made small physical cuts into the printed portraits, almost like scars, based on those stories.

Hello, my name is Giacomo d’Orlando and I am a documentary photographer. 

I am originally from Italy, but I spend most of my time in South East Asia. I travel frequently to work on photojournalist projects and assignments. I am deeply interested in documenting the complex relationship between humans and the environment. 

Much of my work examines the profound impact of climate change on our planet and how society responds to these critical challenges.

This image, taken around 8 meters underwater, is part of a series called ‘Nemo’s Garden’ which documents the world’s first underwater greenhouse system, located in Liguria, Italy. The dark blue color of water dominates the scene, so when you are looking at it, it takes a moment to work out what is happening. 

If you immerse yourself in the image, you will immediately notice six biospheres.  These structures consist of acrylic domes anchored to the seafloor by large steel chains that give them the appearance of giant metal jellyfish.  The curved domes of the biospheres reflect light from the surface above so they appear to be iridescent, pearl-like, and stand out in the darkness of the surrounding water.  Six divers are also visible swimming curiously around the domes. The air bubbles from each diver rise towards the surface, visually similar to the round shape of the biospheres.

Overall, I think the image looks other-worldly. I wanted to make it look mysterious and sci-fi, like something from the future. This is quite fitting, as ‘Nemo's Garden’ was created to research farming solutions for areas where growing plants may be challenging in future scenarios due to climate change.

The moment I discovered this incredible story, I felt the need to document it.  At the time, I had never dived before, so I immediately started an open water course. 

I bought an underwater case for my DSLR camera and, a week after getting certified, I was taking pictures underwater. 

‘Nemo’s Garden’ is not only a pioneering project in the field of sustainable agriculture, but it is also providing interesting data  about the chemical compounds of the plants grown underwater.  In fact, scientific studies conducted at the University of Pisa show that plants grown inside the biospheres have a higher concentration of essential oils, over 31.5% higher antioxidant activity, and a 13.3% increase in polyphenol content compared to plants grown in soil. 

This information could be particularly valuable to the pharmaceutical industry, especially for vaccine production. The opportunity to document the story of ‘Nemo’s Garden’ has changed my perspective as a photographer.  Not only did it push me beyond my physical limits, it made me realise the importance of the deep connection between humans and the marine environment.

Today, I continue to document this relationship in the Asia-Pacific region. Here I am focusing on the resilience of coastal communities in the face of the climate crisis, as well as the scientific research efforts to protect marine ecosystems for future generations.

Photography has the beautiful power to evoke emotions and create empathy between the viewer and the subject. It can also provide context and simplify complex topics. 

It is the most accessible and universal means of communication, a tool that, if used well, has the potential to unify society and help us better understand the world we live in.

Hello my name is Ligaya and I am one of the curators of the Wellcome Photography Prize exhibition. 

The last section in the exhibition is called ‘Things We Left Unseen’. It shows the work of seventeen young people from the township of Khayelitsha just outside Cape Town. 

The young people took part in this participatory image making project led by the South African non-for- profit called Eh!Woza. 

Over the course of a year, the young people learnt how to take photographs,  how to approach difficult subjects and the ethics of taking pictures. They were supported through workshops led by a range of professionals including photographers and curators.

This is an image taken by Thandolwethu Piyose from her series ‘Soup Kitchen Souls’. 

She lives in Khayelitsha. She decided to take a series of photographs of a woman she knows that runs a soup Kitchen in the area. Her name is Mam’uCaleni and she started the KwaCaleni soup kitchen with her husband during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this picture, you can see Mam’uCaleni at the top of a hill, where her newly established community garden is located. She is wearing a brown patterned apron over a white top and a blue patterned skirt and an olive green hat to protect her from the sun. In her right hand is a pitchfork and she is about to turn over what looks like arid, dry soil. In the background you can see the tightly clustered houses of the township along the horizon and a small valley littered with waste.

Thandolwethu wanted to highlight Mam’uCaleni’s initiative as it offers a safe space for people to connect, share their struggles, and find companionship. “The act of sharing a meal”, in her words,  “helped reduce feelings of loneliness, anxiety and depression, which had become increasingly prevalent during the pandemic.” 

More recently, KwaCaleni soup kitchen introduced additional programmes to promote emotional wellbeing and empowerment, such as a teen boxing club and a sewing project.

This image and the others taken by the participants of ‘Things We Left Unseen’ are shown alongside texts that the photographers have written.  The young people describe their hopes for Khayelitsha in their own words:

 “There is hope that one day our community will get the support it needs to thrive and become a place where everyone can live safely, healthily and happily. Despite the challenges, we are proud to call Khayelitsha home because of its warmth, diversity, and the way we look out for one another.”