I can get pregnant, but because there’s no cervix there’s a high chance of miscarriage or early birth.

With its geneses in the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 the carnival would become known as a raucous, popcorn smelling afternoon where one tried to hang on to their wallets walking the midway. Now, her latest work puts vulvas and vaginas in the spotlight thanks to her new book Womanhood: The Bare Reality and forthcoming Channel 4 documentary: 100 Vaginas. I watched a documentary that talked about porn stars who were having operations to make their labia smaller. I think there’s something really powerful about having the opportunity to look at yourself in more detail. I started to re-evaluate what womanhood could look like for me, outside of my biological capabilities.My life journey has been about finding balance within myself – and that’s where I’m finding my healing. I’d be talking to someone whose story I thought was about their wonderful sex life or a health condition, and they’d open up about being raped or an experience in childhood of grooming.

Porn made me feel like shit in all sorts of ways – I think I wasted 12 years of my life suffering because of what I thought my vagina looked like. Ultimately I want to live in a world where we are people and not defined by what’s between our legs. In reality, my labia were probably quite small pieces of skin, but to me they felt like big elephant ears.I’ve probably seen more vaginas than most people, and they’re as different as our faces or our hands. When I was 19, I had a Mirena coil fitted and that caused me to get pelvic inflammatory disease, which was excruciatingly painful. The correct language and understanding of female genitalia is so important to me: the vulva is the whole external package, the vagina is a muscular tube which leads from the cervix (the neck of the womb) down to the vulva. Not being able to conceive doesn’t reduce your value as a woman, it doesn’t make you less of a woman – but that’s kind of what society tells us. According to Sally Rand’s son Sean, it was Gypsy who encouraged his mother to join the grueling schedule of upwards of 30 shows a day for thousands across America.

Circus folks, whom I have interviewed extensively, are quick to point out the differences between them and carnival folk or more derogatory “carneys. The sticky, sweet smell of cotton candy combined with the stench coming from the animals, and mixed with the iron taste of diesel fuel. But there’s a world of difference between how you see vulvas in porn – and how you see them in real life. Because if you find yourself feeling admiration, pride and inspiration for another person, it becomes easier to apply that to yourself, too.I first met Laura, a photographer from Surrey, in 2015 following her exploration of 100 women’s relationships with their breasts. Some of the women I met had looked at themselves lots, some women had never looked and didn’t want to see it, and some women saw it for the first time on the back of my camera, which was a big deal. Even though she refers to it as the hardest part of the project, Laura believes including so many of these harrowing experiences adds to the impact of her message – because there is no singular female experience. After meeting someone who essentially grew up on the carnival grounds I thought I should take a look at the life of the showgirls in the carnival.