Scotiabank Photography Award

The Scotiabank Photography Award is Canada’s largest and most prestigious annual peer-nominated and peer-reviewed award that acknowledges the outstanding contribution that our winners have made to contemporary art and photography. These are artists who strive to invent, influence and redefine the reception of art in ways that will endure. The Scotiabank Photography Award winner exhibition is a featured primary exhibition co-curated by Paul Roth & Gaëlle Morel at the Toronto Image Centre during the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. The winner also receives a $50,000 cash prize and a book of their work published and distributed worldwide by Steidl of Germany.

The Award was co- founded in 2010, by Edward Burtynsky, internationally-renowned Canadian photo artist and Chair of the Scotiabank Photography Award jury, and Scotiabank to strengthen Scotiabank’s commitment to the Arts in Canada.

Scotiabank has a long-standing history of celebrating the importance of photography in Canada and around the world. In 1976, we established the Scotiabank Fine Art Collection and today the collection continues to acquire the work of renowned Canadian photographers, including the work of some of our past Scotiabank Photography Award winners.

In 2006, Scotiabank hosted a photo exhibition that featured the work of Médecins Sans Frontières in the Congo in Scotia Plaza in Toronto and witnessed the powerful way that photography helps people connect with a moment in time.

To deepen our commitment to the Arts and to ensure a major exhibition of a Canadian artist at the Festival, we created the Scotiabank Photography Award. The Award recognizes the achievements of an established mid to later career artist and strives to accelerate their career as he or she reaches for the next level of national and international recognition.

Most recently in 2015, Scotiabank announced that we are a Founding Partner of the Canadian Photography Institute with a $10 million donation, the largest in Scotiabank’s 183 year history, to the National Gallery of Canada towards the creation of the Canadian Photography Institute (CPI).