Toronto's Suzy Lake wins $50K Scotiabank Photography Award

Longtime artist Suzy Lake has won the Scotiabank Photography Award.

Lake was awarded the $50,000 grand prize at a gala reception Tuesday night at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto.

The Toronto-based Lake will also receive a solo primary exhibition at the centre during the 2017 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, and a book of her work will be published and distributed by art book publisher Gerhard Steidl.

Following the social and political unrest of the 1960s, Lake moved from her birthplace of Detroit to Montreal and began her practice in 1968.

She was among the first female artists in Canada to adopt performance, video and photography to explore the politics of gender, the body and identity.

In 1972, she teamed with a dozen other artists to form Vehicule Art Inc., billed as one of the country's first artist-run centres.

The win follows Lake being announced in March as a 2016 winner of the$25,000 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Founded in 2010, the Scotiabank Photography Awardis billed as Canada's largest peer-nominated, peer-reviewed photography honour.It recognizes a mid- to later-career artist.