Whether you are a professional, student or amateur photographer, Wellcome Trust invites you to enter the Photography Prize 2020, which celebrates compelling imagery that will encourage conversations about the mental health challenges of our time. For 2020, our theme is Mental Health, which covers two of our five prize categories. We’re still keen to receive photos relating to other health issues as well.

At Wellcome, we believe a radical new approach is needed to transform the science of mental health. As well as with the prize this year we want to transform public perceptions too. We are particularly interested in how we visually address the issue of people living with or recovering from mental health problems.

Wellcome Photography Prize Categories

Wellcome Photography Prize 2020 is open to enter in five categories of Mental Health. Moreover, the participants may use any form of photography including documentary, reportage, portrait, landscape, fine art photography or collage.

• Social Perspectives (single image): explore how good and bad health affects society.
• Hidden Worlds (single image): expose hidden details, combat health taboos or reveal places difficult to access.
• Medicine in Focus (single image): show healthcare, medicine or surgery up close and personal.
• Mental Health (single image): dispel the visual clichés of mental illness, fight stigmas as well as explore an individual’s lived experience or recovery.
• Mental Health (series of up to five images): tell a story through related images that explore the spectrum of mental health to mental ill-health.

Winners of the Wellcome Photography Prize

The total prize of the Wellcome Photography Prize 2020 is £15,000. The winner of each category will receive £1,250 with opportunities to showcase the work to a range of audiences. Further, the winning images receive extensive international media coverage each year. Also, one entrant of the Medicine in Focus category will be invited to produce the Julie Dorrington commission, a photo story exploring and documenting a patient’s journey with their condition

How to enter the Wellcome Photography Prize?

Wellcome Photography Prize 2020 on Mental Health is free to enter. Moreover, candidates may submit as many images as they like, except for the Mental Health Series category where the submission limit is a maximum of five. However, candidates may not enter the same image in more than one category.

In order to make the submission in the Photography Contest, the candidates, at first, must register for the competition. Only then the candidates may make the submission for the photograph via the online application

Judging criteria

The story behind your image and the reasons you created it are as important as the image itself. Judges will aware of all images anonymously on the following criteria.

• Visual merit
  • Strong visual impact.
  • Thoughtful, considered composition.
  • Use of color (or intentional lack of color) to enhance impact.
• Storytelling
  • A clear link to health, medicine or science.
  • Strong story or research project behind the image.
• Technical merit
  • Good image quality for the type of imaging technique used.
  • Appropriate as well as skillful image manipulation/editing, if used.
  • Submission of the high-resolution image suitable for print.

Deadline

Entrants may make the submission for the Wellcome Photograph Prize until 11:59 pm (GMT) on 16 December 2019. Submission after the deadline is not valid.