A feminist has photographed 100 women's breasts and raised nearly £25,000 to the publish the unairbrushed images in a book.

Laura Dodsworth, a photographer from Epsom, took photos of women and recorded their intimate, moving stories anonymously over two years for her project Bare Reality.

The women, aged 19 to 101 with breast sizes AAA to K, include a Buddhist nun, a burlesque dancer, cancer survivors, career women and stay at home mums.

Mrs Dodsworth said: "We don’t normally see that diverse range. It’s visually refreshing, it’s almost startling."

The photos provide a striking contrast to the more uniform images of breasts in the media where models and actresses are airbrushed to meet ideas of perfection.

She said: "What we are aspiring to is an unachievable ideal. What my project reveals is the bare reality. This is what 100 women look like. This is real life."

Mrs Dodsworth herself appears in the book, but without anonymity, and likes herself more as a woman because of the project.

She thanked the women who "bravely" told her very personal stories about their lives and explained how they feel about their breasts.

She said: "Sometimes they share some really beautiful moments in life through to the more mundane aspects of life. Sometimes they share more painful moments."

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Mrs Dodsworth, who will not allow the publication of individual women's photos without their full stories alongside, has signed the No More Page 3 petition to stop the tradition in the Sun newspaper.

She said: "I think it's depressing that the largest image of a woman in the British press day in day out is a Page 3 model.

"I think it's more interesting to see women reported for making the news, not just seeing breasts to decorate the news."

Mrs Dodsworth already has 675 backers but hopes to hit her target of 1,000 though her fundraising webpage where people can pre-order the book.

In a video with a montage of breasts, which has been viewed a million times, Mrs Dodsworth said: "Breasts are body parts, they don’t define women.

"Yet they represent sexuality, motherhood and femininity. We see images of breasts everywhere in the media and there is so much public debate about breasts.

"I don’t think the time has even been better to hear from women how they feel personally about their breasts."

She added: "I think we really need to burst the fantasy bubble of perfect media breasts."

Bare Reality will donate £1 from every book sold to Breast Cancer UK.

To back the project visit www.kickstarter.com/projects/barereality/bare-reality-100-women-and-their-breasts

The fundraising drive ends on October 11.