About. 

The Death Letter Project is an ongoing Australian photography and writing project created by photographer and social activist Tina FiveAsh. Since 2014, the project has invited Australians from diverse backgrounds to handwrite a personal letter responding to two universal questions: What is death? and What happens when we die?

Combining handwritten correspondence with intimate photographic portraits, the online socially engaged project explores contemporary beliefs, fears, hopes, grief, spirituality, and the enduring mystery surrounding mortality. Each letter is presented alongside a portrait photographed in the participant’s own environment, creating a deeply personal record of both presence and perspective.

What began as an invitation to fifty Australians has continued to expand organically over the past decade. Since 2023, FiveAsh has been extending the series toward one hundred Australian participants, further broadening the project’s cultural and philosophical scope. Contributors include individuals who have experienced near-death events, profound grief and loss, spiritual awakenings, and who hold diverse understandings of the afterlife.

As the letters gradually arrived—by post, email, or personal delivery—the act of reading them became an intimate ritual in itself: unfolding handwritten pages and encountering the innermost reflections of strangers and acquaintances alike. Through these exchanges, the project has evolved into not only an archive of voices, but an ongoing meditation on mortality, remembrance, spirituality, and what it means to be human.

In contemporary Western culture, death is often medicalised, institutionalised, and removed from everyday conversation. The Death Letter Project seeks to contribute to the growing international movement surrounding death literacy: encouraging more open, compassionate, and meaningful engagement with death, dying, grief, and end-of-life reflection. By creating space for personal testimony, vulnerability, and philosophical inquiry, the project invites audiences to reconsider mortality not solely as an ending, but as a subject worthy of contemplation, dialogue, and cultural visibility.

The Death Letter Project has generated significant public engagement, leading to invitations for FiveAsh to speak on national and international radio programs, podcasts, panel discussions, workshops, conferences, and annual events such as the Sydney Festival of Death and Dying. In 2019, the project inspired Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina, to launch their own Death Letter Project commemorating the cemetery’s 150th anniversary.

In 2024, FiveAsh was interviewed by Ray Martin about the Death Letter Project for the three-part SBS documentary series Ray Martin: The Last Goodbye, produced by BBC Studios Australia.

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