There are bodies everywhere in photographer Ornella Mari’s debut photobook Through Hardship to the Stars, and they are rarely at ease: open mouths, bruised knees, a mascara-run face, snarling dogs and slabs of raw meat. The visceral project, photographed between 2020 and 2024, builds a world around girlhood, body image, and the violence of becoming visible.

At the centre of the work is Mari’s lifelong sense of dislocation. Half-Italian and half-Hungarian, born in Brussels and raised in Hungary, she grew up between languages, cultures and conflicting expectations of what a woman should be. “Femininity never felt like something I naturally possessed. It felt like something I was expected to perform correctly,” she admits. “The project became a space where I could separate my own understanding of womanhood from the expectations that surrounded it.”

That sense of in-betweenness runs through Through Hardship to the Stars, where Mari moves between staged self-portraits and more unsettling fragments of daily life – bruised skin, icy landscapes, roadkill and rotting carcasses, dark forests illuminated by the eerie flash of a camera. The body is constantly being negotiated in these images: controlled in some moments, exposed in others, but never entirely stable.

The title of the project is a direct translation of the Latin phrase Per aspera ad astra, which a younger Mari held onto as a promise of better things to come. “For a long time, I thought the ‘stars’ represented some future version of myself who would eventually figure everything out,” she says. But over time, that idea shifted. “Now I see the stars as moments of self-recognition rather than a destination.” 

Through Hardship to the Stars began from a sense of discomfort with her own image. “Whenever I saw a picture of myself, I immediately focused on everything I thought was wrong,” she says. Photography became a way of controlling that discomfort rather than facing it directly. “I hid behind concepts, mirrors, symbols, and visual tricks,” she explains. “If I couldn’t accept myself directly, I could at least create a version of myself that felt easier to look at.” But she worked on the project, she began moving towards a more direct, exposing confrontation with her body.

While they may at first appear unconnected, Mari’s shots of animals – a striking black horse standing by a tree, a sheep staring down the camera – are a different way of tackling the same concerns. “I became interested in anthropomorphic qualities and in using animals as emotional stand-ins for human behaviour. They allowed me to explore instinct, aggression, vulnerability, territoriality, survival, and power in ways that felt more complex than simply photographing my own body,” she says. The photos of meat and dolls, which appear throughout the book, occupy a similarly uneasy space between attraction and repulsion. “They exist between tenderness and violence,” she explains, describing them as “useful metaphors for discussing the body without illustrating those ideas too literally.”

The book opens with an essay, "The Hour Between the Dog & the Wolf," by Dazed’s Art & Photography Editor Emily Dinsdale, which situates Mari’s work within a broader context of sexual consciousness, shame, and adolescence. “Being a teenage girl is its own kind of statelessness,” she writes. “It’s a time of perilous metamorphosis when we are neither child nor woman but a third thing.” These reflections emphasise that the project, for all its hard-edged specificity, reveals a more expansive truth about the experience of femininity and adolescence.

Now that these experiences have been fixed within the pages of Through Hardship to the Stars, Mari is learning to let them exist beyond her own perspective. “If someone recognises a part of themselves in these images, then the project has done something meaningful beyond my own story,” she says. Releasing the work into the world feels “terrifying and liberating in almost equal measure” – it’s a fitting conclusion to a project shaped by the anxiety of becoming visible without fully controlling how one is seen.

Through Hardship to the Stars is published by and avaliable to purchase here