The Wellcome Photography Prize has unveiled its Top 25 entries, selected for the 2025 edition of the awards. The competition showcases powerful images that capture urgent global health challenges.
There are three awards: Striking Solo Photography; A Storytelling Series; and The Marvels of Scientific and Medical Imaging. Each photographer who tops these categories will receive $10,000 ($13,600), with all other finalists getting $1,000 (1,360).
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, the US, and beyond.
Striking Solo Photography
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 there. Nonetheless, seen from above, it is eerily beautiful, with swirls of red and gold in poisoned water. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025In ‘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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025In ‘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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘Marks of majesty: Vanessa’, 2024 By Julia Comita and Stephanie Francis Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025In ‘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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘Cricket is my emotions’, 2024 By Ziaul Huque Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025Searching 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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘Pie-by-Sam’ 2024 By Reatile Moalusi Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025Resilience Artist by Pyaephyo Thetpaing shows a craftsman in Myanmar painting and carving using only his left foot, having lost his other limbs. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025In ‘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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025With 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. | | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025In 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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025
A Storytelling Series
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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025In ‘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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘A thousand cuts’, 2023 By Sujata Setia Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025Many 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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025
The Marvels of Scientific and Medical Imaging
In Cholesterol in the Liver, Steve Gschmeissner shows crystals forming inside cells, microscopic shapes with life-threatening consequences. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025Organoids by Oliver Meckes and Nicole Ottawa presents lab-grown uterine tissue, tiny structures that may one day replace the need for animal testing. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025In Brixton Road, Marina Vitaglione transforms London air pollution into ghostly cyanotypes, making the invisible tangible. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘Blooming barrier’, 2024 By Lucy Holland Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025Jander Matos and Joaquim Nascimento’s Submarine Fever depicts a mosquito egg in vivid detail, highlighting how warming climates accelerate the spread of disease. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘Ice and Fire Chronics: The Chagas Disease Invadee’, 2020 By Ingrid Augusto, Kildare Rocha de Miranda and Vania da Silva Vieira Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025In 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. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘From butterflies to humans’, 2023 By Amaia Alcalde Anton Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025
Based in London, England, Wellcome is a museum and library that “supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone.” The Wellcome Photography Prize 2025 exhibition will be held at the Francis Crick Institute in London from July 17 to October 18. More info here.
