The Wellcome Photography Prize has unveiled its Top 25 entries from the 2025 edition of the competition. Showcasing powerful images that cover themes and subjects such as climate change, women’s health, mental wellbeing as well as research that can impact and improve our future. Winners will be announced on 16 July 2025.
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; Caroline Hunter, Picture Editor at the Guardian Saturday Magazine; Daniella Zalcman, Photographer and Founder of Women Photograph; Noah Green, Beautiful Biology initiative at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and more.
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.”
Wellcome Photography Prize 2025: 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
See more from the Wellcome Photography Prize.
Winners announcement and exhibition
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
- Francis Crick Institute, 1 Midland Road, London, NW1 1AT
- 17 July – 18 October 2025
- Open Wednesdays to Saturdays, 10am-4pm (Wednesdays until 8pm)
- Admission free
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