 A great photograph should capture you in a powerful way initially and then offers in its silence room for ongoing contemplation about what the implications of what you're looking at may be. We can talk about it, we can write about it. How science and medicine and public health and innovation and society come together. An image, a photograph can just put you there. That's what we wanted from the Welcome Photography Prize. Good photography can capture empathy, can capture caring, the fears, the frustrations. By showing that welcome and science care about these things, I think that expression of caring and listening is crucial. Between us all I think we're looking for an image which really speaks to something important about how the world is or the trajectory in which the world is moving and really brings to the foreground some vital issue. I look for work that is really innovative, work that pushes the boundary of photography, work that really makes you think about the story that photography is trying to tell. For me an image is powerful when it tells a story but in addition when it creates an emotion that will somehow break your indifference about a specific issue. People working on health issues out there, it's perhaps the sector that's always fixated on advancement and I think the photography should be adjusting and updating and transforming the photographic language that we use on the health front. We have been excited and moved by the pictures that we've seen. If we can be moved as a group of people who are seeing these things all the time I think it would be wonderful to show the wider audience and I think they'll be wowed. We had a lot of heated discussions about what the implications of these photographs are and certainly there were many photographs that could have occupied this space. A lot of the images are presenting to us hugely important aspects of health and medicine around the world. What really works is a story either about the state of humankind, the state of our planet, the wonders hidden underneath our skin. Looking through these incredible bodies of work there's something that will move you emotionally but also have a visual language which is complex and refined and sophisticated. So I look at what's the power of the image and then what's the story? What is it trying to tell us and does it want me to come back and look again? I think that we've seen both in technique and subject selection innovative approaches that break from tradition in exciting ways. We don't really have a strong understanding of the connection between the natural world and the origins of zoonotic diseases. I think this image does a particularly good job of engaging that grey and largely misunderstood area. We have an aging population across the world and we don't know yet how to tackle that. Maybe in the future our only companion would be robot. And so I think it speaks to how we are as a society developing. It's one of those stories that so many people do not know about around disability. Photography really had that ability to get us to have a bit more compassion around topics and issues that are complex. And the overall winner of The Welcome Photographer Prize 2019 is a really beautiful photograph. I feel relaxed when I play with String, a picture of Liam taken by his sister Erin Lefevre. It's the most powerful image I've seen in many, many years and speaks to us all about autism but beyond autism into what makes us all human. There's a real tangible aspect to it and there's a real relatability to the image and there's a tenderness to the image I think that really is very, very moving. We have so little time in society these days for contemplation. Something as simple as playing with a string to calm and to find some peace is actually I thought an insight. That image that has one spoke to me absolutely instantly the moment I saw it. It talks to me about what it takes to be happy, what it means to have ambition, what it is to have an illness, what is an illness, what's not an illness. To create something that becomes iconic and says something powerful, that's hard but I actually genuinely believe that this winning image is that.