Sarah Anne Johnson is the inaugural winner of the $50,000 Grange Prize for Contemporary Photography, it was announced tonight by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

Known for realist-looking images where documentary and fantasy merge, the 31-year-old Winnipeg photographer/teacher plans to use the award to buy a cabin in the woods near Lake Winnipeg.

Although her work often shows people roughing it outdoors, the cabin "will have electricity and running water," she says. "It will be my studio in the summer."

Named after The Grange, the AGO's Historic Home and underwritten by Aeroplan, The Grange Prize is the largest given in the country for photography. The biannual Roloff Beny Book Award for excellence in photographic book publishing gives an award of $30,000 to an individual photographer.

Johnson received 53 per cent of a total of 2,700 votes worldwide in a popularity contest hosted by the Grand Prize's website, www.thegrandprize.com. where her photographs were shown along with work by Miao Xiaochun, Huang Yan, Liu Zheng and Raymonde April, a Montr??aler who was the only other Canadian finalist.

Johnson's photo series, "Tree Planting," shows groups of young people planting trees in the British Columbia wilds alongside other images of human-like statues seemingly participating in this Canadian rite-of-passage. A similar mixture of documentary naturalism and eerie fantasy can be found in her suite of Galapagos Island pictures.

"In photography, the purists believe you're showing a slice of life that exists through the photograph itself," she says. "The non-purists use photography to explain an idea they have in their heads. Being a typical Canadian, I had to do it all."

Her planned AGO exhibition next spring may include "a new body of work I'm doing that's terrifying," she says. It's about my grandmother, Vel Orlikow, my mother and myself."

In the 1950s, Velma Orlikow was a patient at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montr??al when she was unknowingly given LSD in a botched experiment conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency. Years later Orlikow sued the CIA and won.

pgoddard@thestar.ca

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