TORONTO.- Aimia, a global leader in loyalty management, and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) announce the four artists who have been shortlisted for the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize, Canada’s leading international contemporary photography award. The winner of the $50,000 Prize is chosen entirely by public vote, and online voting opens today at AimiaAGOPhotographyPrize.com and, for the first time, on the Prize’s Facebook page. Visitors to the AGO can also cast a vote inside the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize 2013 Exhibition, on view at the AGO from Sept. 11, 2013 to Jan. 5, 2014.

The finalists are: Edgardo Aragón (Mexico), LaToya Ruby Frazier (U.S.A), Chino Otsuka (Japan/U.K) and Erin Shirreff (Canada). As a group, these four artists represent a snapshot of current directions in photography and video, in which images are used to build powerful, complex and often personal narratives.

• Edgardo Aragón was born in Mexico, and his work invites reflection on the history of violence in his homeland. Deeply engaged with political and social histories of Oaxaca, the province where he was born and still lives, his video and photography often document performance and sculptural interventions against landscapes that appear at once serene and foreboding. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City; MoMA P.S.1, New York; and the Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles.

• LaToya Ruby Frazier was born and raised in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her work is informed by late 19th- and early 20th-century modes of representation in documentary practice. She uses the conventions of social documentary and portraiture to expose untold stories of post-industrial decline in the United States, filtered through the experiences of her own family and community in Braddock. Her work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; MoMA PS1; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. In 2012 Frazier was appointed critic in photography at Yale University.

• Chino Otsuka was born in Tokyo, Japan, and moved to the U.K. at the age of 10 to attend school. Often mining her own autobiography, Otsuka uses photography and video to explore the fluid relationship between memory, time and photography. She has also published four books in Japan as a writer and published her first autobiographical book at the age of 15. Her works are found in public collections including National Media Museum, U.K., Wilson Centre for Photography, U.K., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

• Erin Shirreff was born in 1975 in Kelowna, B.C., and now lives and works in New York. Her work interweaves photography, video and sculpture to extend and explore the act of looking, asking questions about the often paradoxical relationship between time and space and the image, and the impact of perception on the location of meaning. Recently her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C.; White Cube, London, U.K.; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ont. Her work is also in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.

A jury of three—made up of lead juror Elizabeth Smith, former AGO executive director of curatorial affairs and current executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York; Urs Stahel, director, curator, and editor of Fotomuseum Winterthur; and artist Kader Attia—selected the four finalists from a long list of 14.

“The jurors were delighted with the strength and diversity of the long-listed artists,” said Smith. “In choosing the four finalists, we responded most to qualities that made the work fresh, powerful and original in some way. We looked for strength, coherence and consistency in the interplay of imagery and content and selected the artists whose work made the most pronounced impact on all of us.”

These artists will receive a fully funded six-week residency in Canada next year, and their work will be exhibited at the AGO beginning Sept.11, 2013. A free public launch party will be held at the AGO that night, with presentations by nominators and members of the jury about each of the four artists.

The following evening, Sept. 12, 2013 at 7 p.m., the four artists will speak at a special panel event at the AGO alongside Smith; AGO associate curator of photography Sophie Hackett; and nominators Jennifer Blessing, senior curator of photography at The Guggenheim; and Helga Pakasaar, curator at Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver. Tickets to the event are available now.

The winner will receive $50,000 CDN and the three remaining finalists will each receive a cash honorarium of $5,000 CDN. Online voting begins today at AimiaAGOPhotographyPrize.com and is open until 11:59 p.m. on Nov. 5, 2013. For the first time, voters can also make their choice via Facebook at Facebook.com/AimiaAGOPhotographyPrize. Users who vote on Facebook can also enter for a chance to win a trip to the winner announcement event on Nov. 7, 2013, at the AGO’s popular First Thursdays art party.

Previous winners of the Prize, formerly titled The Grange Prize, include British photographer Jo Longhurst (2012), Gauri Gill of India (2011), Canadian photographer Kristan Horton (2010), Marco Antonio Cruz of Mexico (2009) and Canadian photographer Sarah Anne Johnson (2008).