Dead and Alive

Dead and Alive is a long-term documentary project exploring how people around the world understand death, care for their dead, and create meaning in the face of loss.

My interest in death did not begin as a photographic project. It began through personal encounters with death and loss, and through an awareness of my own fear of dying.

I grew up in Denmark, where death is often handled quietly, privately, and at a distance. It is rarely part of everyday conversation, and for a long time my own fear remained largely unexamined.

When I began researching death rituals and developing the project, I gradually became aware that the relationship with death I had grown up with was far from universal. In many cultures, death is far more visible. The dead may remain physically present, funerals may involve entire communities, and relationships with the deceased may continue for years or generations.

This discovery became central to the development of Dead and Alive.

For more than fifteen years, I have documented funeral ceremonies, burial traditions, cremations, exhumations, ancestor rituals, and other cultural responses to death across the world.

The rituals differ profoundly. Some are quiet and intimate. Others unfold over several days, involve hundreds of people, or continue long after the body has been buried.

Yet they all respond to the same fundamental human reality: someone has died, and the living must find a way to understand the loss.

What Death Reveals About Life

Death rituals are never only about the dead.

They reveal how people understand family, community, responsibility, memory, identity, spirituality, and the relationship between the individual and society.

The way a culture treats its dead often reflects the way it understands life.

Some traditions emphasise separation and finality. Others regard death as a transition into an ancestral or spiritual existence. In some places, the dead remain close through offerings, ceremonies, photographs, preserved bodies, or recurring physical encounters with their remains.

Through these practices, people give shape to grief and place death within a larger cultural and spiritual framework.

Dead and Alive explores these differences without attempting to reduce them to a single explanation. The project is driven by curiosity about how human beings confront the same certainty in remarkably different ways.

A Long-Term Documentary Archive

The project has taken me to Greenland, Haiti, Guatemala, Romania, Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal, India, Ghana, Israel, Finland, Indonesia, Madagascar, and Denmark.

Each series focuses on a particular ritual, tradition, or social setting. Together, they form a growing visual archive of how death is understood and practised across cultures.

The work is based on time, access, trust, and close attention to context. It is not intended to present death as spectacle or the rituals as exotic curiosities.

My aim is to document each practice with dignity and to understand it on its own cultural terms.

Dead and Alive is both a photographic project and an ongoing reference archive. It is intended for anyone interested in death rituals, funeral traditions, cultural responses to mortality, and the ways in which human beings care for their dead.

Ultimately, the project is not only about death.

It is about what our relationship with death can reveal about the way we choose to live.