Scotiabank Photography Award Reveals 2015 Finalists

TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - March 04, 2015) - The jury of the Scotiabank Photography Award is proud to announce that the finalists for 2015 are gifted Canadian photographers Rafael Goldchain, Angela Grauerholz and Isabelle Hayeur.

Now in its fifth year, the Scotiabank Photography Award was created to raise the international profile of Canada's leading photographic artists and is Canada's largest annual peer-reviewed celebration of excellence in Canadian contemporary photography. 

"The Scotiabank Photography Award is designed to be an annual search for excellence," said Edward Burtynsky, Chair of the Scotiabank Photography Award jury and internationally renowned Canadian photo artist. "The three artists on the 2015 shortlist each have unique and distinctive bodies of work that show true excellence in Canadian contemporary photography. We look forward to announcing the winner of this year's award on May 6."

The Scotiabank Photography Award was founded by Edward Burtynsky and Jane Nokes, Scotiabank's Director of Arts, Culture, & Heritage and Executive Director of the Scotiabank Photography Award. The Award is designed to provide support to a mid-career artist as he or she reaches for the next level of national and international recognition.

The 2015 Scotiabank Photography Award Shortlist Finalists are:

1. Rafael Goldchain was born in 1953 of Polish-Jewish heritage in Santiago, Chile and was educated in Jerusalem, Israel before moving to Toronto. He photographed in México and Central America in the 1980s and 1990s. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Goldchain moved into the studio to stage a series of self-portraits of himself as his ancestors, many of whom were lost in the Holocaust, or displaced over South and Central America in the early 20th century. Goldchain's life and work are the subject of a documentary film entitled "Beautifully Broken: The Life and Times of Rafael Goldchain."

2. Angela Grauerholz was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1952, and has lived and worked in Montreal since 1976. A graduate of the Kunstschule Alsterdamm, Hamburg, in graphic design, she holds a Master's degree in Fine Arts (photography) from Concordia University, Montreal. In 1980, she was a co-founder of ARTEXTE, centre d'information en art contemporain, still today an important archive for Canadian art. In 2010, the National Gallery of Canada in collaboration with the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP) mounted a major exhibition of her work.

3. Isabelle Hayeur was born in Montreal in 1969, Isabelle Hayeur is a digital image artist recognized for her large-sized photographic montages, videos, and site-specific installations, in which she highlights urban blights and sprawl, among a number of industrial society's pitfalls. Her works are to be found in some twenty collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Fonds national d'art contemporain in Paris, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

"The Scotiabank Photography Award is the most prestigious award in Canadian contemporary photography. It celebrates the vision of talented Canadian artists who have a unique way of telling a story through the lens of a camera," explained Nokes. "The Scotiabank Photography Award is peer-reviewed at every stage of the nomination and adjudication process, and recognizes contemporary Canadian photographers whose work adds to the richness of communities across the country."