Human Syntax

• Prize
  Honorable Mention
• Photographer
  Laurence Lao, United States

Human Syntax explores the architecture of human absence — how traces, structures, and voids speak where bodies do not. Influenced by the system aesthetics of Kraftwerk and the emotional austerity of Joy Division, the series investigates people not as subjects but as signs within constructed environments. This deliberate dehumanization reframes the human as a symbolic unit — a temporary syntax embedded in ordered space. Each scene appears isolated, a fragment without narrative, yet together, they compose the outline of a person: unseen, yet structurally present.