Photo credit: Steve Gschmeissner, Mithail Afrige Chowdhury, and Sujata Setia.
The winners of the 2025 Wellcome Photography Prize have been unveiled at a ceremony held at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
Three photographers, UK-based artist Sujata Setia, Bangladeshi documentary and street photographer Mithail Afrige Chowdhury, and UK-based electron microscopy specialist and science photographer Steve Gschmeissner, have each been awarded a £10,000 ($13,500) prize.
“The winning images reflect how science and health shape people’s lives in complex and deeply personal ways, from the hidden toll of domestic abuse to the everyday realities of climate migration, to the microscopic processes that underpin heart disease,” Wellcome, a charitable foundation focused on health research, says per a press release.
The Winners
Mithail Afrige Chowdhury was awarded the Striking Solo Photography prize for Urban Travel, a deceptively gentle image of 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 resilience. Nearly half of Dhaka’s population today are climate migrants, displaced by increasingly extreme weather, and Chowdhury’s work highlights the everyday consequences of these shifts: the loss of green space, of childhood rituals, of breath. The photograph is tender, composed, and yet filled with tension, a portrait of care and adaptation under invisible pressures.
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. Winner of the Striking Solo Photography category. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025
The winner of The Marvels of Scientific and Medical Imaging was announced as Steve Gschmeissner, whose electron microscopy image Cholesterol in the Liver reveals cholesterol crystals (shown in blue) forming inside lipid-laden liver cells (purple). 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. Gschmeissner’s colourised SEM image transforms this biological process into something visually striking, part data, part artwork. With a career spanning over four decades, and more than 10,000 images published in scientific journals, stamp collections, fashion collaborations, and music albums, his work exemplifies how imaging can bridge science and culture.
In Cholesterol in the Liver, Steve Gschmeissner shows crystals forming inside cells, microscopic shapes with life-threatening consequences. Winner of The Marvels of Scientific and Medical Imaging category. | Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025
Sujata Setia was recognised for A Thousand Cuts, 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. Setia worked with the women and with the charity SHEWISE to create portraits that protected anonymity without erasing identity, applying the Indian paper-cutting technique sanjhi to overlay each photograph. The results are intimate, powerful reflections on generational trauma, silence, survival, and the politics of representation. From the account of a woman forced into marriage twice by her father and left with lasting PTSD, to a mother determined to break the cycle of violence for her daughter, the series captures how abuse can become ingrained and normalised, and how art can offer a means of reclaiming narrative.
‘A thousand cuts’, 2023 By Sujata Setia Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘A thousand cuts’, 2023 By Sujata Setia. Winner of A Storytelling Series. Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘A thousand cuts’, 2023 By Sujata Setia. Winner of A Storytelling Series. Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘A thousand cuts’, 2023 By Sujata Setia. Winner of A Storytelling Series. Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025‘A thousand cuts’, 2023 By Sujata Setia. Winner of A Storytelling Series. Courtesy of Wellcome Photography Prize 2025
The Finalists
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 ‘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 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 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 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
Organoids 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
At the ceremony in London, England, this evening, the winners were presented with their prize, with the remaining finalists each receiving a £1,000 ($1,350) prize, totaling £52,000 ($70,000) in awards. The top 25 entries are on display in the Wellcome Photography Prize 2025 exhibition, which is free and open to the public at the Francis Crick Institute, running from 17 July to 18 October 2025. More info here.
