Pascal Grandmaison of Montreal, Suzy Lake of Toronto, and Jayce Salloum of Vancouver were selected as finalists for the Scotiabank Photography Award, the selection committee announced Wednesday.

“Canada’s largest and most prestigious annual peer-nominated and peer-reviewed award,” according to its website, was founded in 2010 and includes a $50,000 cash prize, an exhibition at Toronto’s Ryerson Image Centre, and a book deal with German publisher Steidl.

Lake already made headlines this week after being named one of eight recipients of this year’s Governor-General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, all of whom receive a $25,000 cash prize. A pioneer in Canada of incorporating gender and body politics in her work, Lake frequently casts herself as the subject of her photography, often interrogating notions of identity through role-play, such as in her 83-piece installation “Are You Talking to Me?…,” 1979.

A 2014 winner of the same award, Salloum has had a nomadic life. His experiences in Lebanon, from which his grandparents emigrated, have particularly influenced his work, which often focuses on issues of place, minimalist and maximalist, local and global. Regarding his photography, he has said that his “own position as an image maker is situated somewhere between being a family member, visitor, tourist, guide, and unwilling orientalist… never occupying any one position for too long, fluctuating peripatetically between the act of re-producing and the deconstruction of such an act and its object.”

Grandmaison, the youngest of the three finalists, gained notoriety with his photo series “Verre,” 2004-05, in which the subjects of his portraits were doubly mediated by the lens of his camera and the sheet of glass they each held in front of their bodies. He has since begun working predominantly with video, including his most recent two-part piece “La Vie Abstraite” (currently on view at Galerie René Blouin in Montreal). Inspired by Kasimir Malevich and the Suprematist movement, the work probes the dividing line between objective observation and pure abstraction.

In a statement, Edward Burtynsky, chair of the awards jury since 2011, said, “The Scotiabank Photography Award is designed to be an annual search for excellence. The three finalists on the 2016 shortlist are exceptional artists with unique and distinctive bodies of work that show outstanding quality in Canadian contemporary photography. We look forward to announcing the winner of this year’s award on May 3.”