Indian artist Gauri Gill has won the $50,000 Grange Prize, Canada’s largest photography prize.

New Delhi-based Gill triumphed over two Canadian photographers — Elaine Stocki and Althea Thauberger — to win the award Tuesday at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario.

The Grange Prize annually pits two Canadian photographers against two from another country — this year India. Nandini Valli of Chennai, India, was the other nominee for 2011.

Gill works in black and white and in colour and has a particular interest in marginalized communities. She spent 10 years shooting photographs of rural women from different generations in Rajasthan and has investigated issues around migrancy and change generated by an expanding city. She says her work is "deeply personal" as she likes to live among her subjects.

The nominating jury hailed her for "depicting the artist's often-intimate relationships with her subjects with a documentary spirit and a human concern over issues of survival."

Michelle Jacques, the AGO's acting curator of Canadian art and a member of the nominating jury, said Gill photographs people with an "insider's view" because she photographs them for an extended period and considers them friends.

Gauri Gill's photograph Balika Mela Portraits 12, from the series Balika Mela Portraits, 2003, archival pigment print. Gill has won the Grange Prize. Courtesy of Gauri Gill/Art Gallery of Ontario

"All of these artists tell alternative histories through their images of people, and Gauri Gill has a real sensitivity to how to photograph some really challenging subjects," Jacques told CBC News.

"She wanted to approach her project in such a way that she really told the stories of the kind of everyday heroism of the people who live in this region rather than just objectifying them and taking pictures of their beautiful costumes and jewelry and surroundings," she said.

The winner is chosen by public vote after online and gallery exhibits of work by the four nominees. Votes this year came from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Mexico, as well as India and Canada.

"It is an honour to have my work sort of acknowledged in this way, and I guess that finally that it was decided by public vote," Gill told CBC News in an interview on Wednesday. "In a sense you know, that's very interesting to me [that] so many people entered and actually bothered to look and vote."

Gill said she was teaching photography until two years ago, but now makes a living from her work.

"One of the things that I think photography does is, it is in some sense democratic, hugely so, I mean both in the making and the viewing of images," she add. "And it can reach people who don't have...the English language or may not have access to those kinds of privileged languages but you can still speak through photography."

Gill was born in Chandigarh, India, in 1970 and studied at the Delhi College of Art in New Delhi and the Parsons School of Design in New York. Her work is shown widely in India and she has had solo exhibitions in London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Chicago and New York.

She and Valli were chosen to compete by a jury that included Gayatri Sinha, a Delhi-based critic and Sunil Gupta, an international photographer, as well as Jacques and Canadian Wayne Baerwaldt.

Each of the contestants gets an international residency and the finalists each win $5,000. The Canadian photographers will go to India in 2012.