Los Angeles- Legendary soft-core and pin-up photographer Lance Kincaid has announced the discovery of a rare cache of long-lost black & white photographic negatives, contact sheets, and photos of the late Shauna Grant (real name Colleen Applegate), one of the most famous and controversial XXX stars of all time who committed suicide in 1984.

The materials will now be put up for sale on Kincaid’s glamour-photo auction website, www.pinup4u.com

Kincaid, who began covering the adult entertainment over 43 years ago as a glamour studio photographer, came across the thought-to-be-destroyed box of pix of Grant while renovating his property last week in Los Angeles. The photos were taken shortly before her tragic death just before her 21st birthday, as Grant sought to make a transition out of porn into “straight modeling.”

“I had photographed Shauna on many, many occasions, from the first day she got into porn when she had just turned 18. But this shoot was special, it was the last time she posed for any photographer, and it was meant to create a special black and white portfolio for her to try to get out of porn,” recalls Kincaid.

“It was her portfolio of photos that was to be her ticket to a different, better life outside of the porn business. We took all kinds of pictures, she picked the ones she wanted, and we printed them all up and she was ready to go out on interviews with legitimate modeling agencies. She was all set, she h ad everything she needed, but she never got to use them. She told me it was her ‘portfolio of hope’, it was her passport out, she told me.”

But Grant never got a chance to use the never-before-seen pix, instead putting a gun to her head in a bizarre suicide shortly thereafter. All of the negatives and photos from the photo-session at Kincaid’s Tarzana, California studio were believed to have been lost in the chaos that followed her death. But apparently at some point someone shipped the materials back to Kincaid’s busy Los Angeles office, where it was tossed, un-opened, into a crowded storage space, and forgotten about (and further buried under boxes after the 1994 California earthquake)—until last week.

“It was quite a shock, I hadn’t seen these photos in close to 25 years. And to see the original contact sheets, where Shauna herself had personally circled the pictures she wanted re-produced, it really brought back the memories,” says Kincaid.

Ironically the last time anyone ever saw the long-missing pictures, was when they appeared briefly in an award-winning documentary produced by PBS’s show Frontline about Grant’s life and death, called “Death of A Porn Queen.” In that film the producers went to Grant’s Reseda, California apartment shortly after her death, and continued filming as Grant’s landlady rummaged through her belongings, at one point opening up a folder and pulling out the pix.

“I saw that documentary, and couldn’t believe it, they pulled out the photos we took that day and gave to Shauna,” says Kincaid, “There were these photos, they actually filmed them for a moment, and that was the last anyone ever saw of them. They simply disappeared. Until I just found them this week when I was moving some old crates of files around.”

Kincaid had a close relationship with Grant, and she often stayed at his LA home which he shared with adult video producer Bobby Hollander—who actually “named” Grant when she first came into the X-biz via the Jim South World Modeling agency in 1982 at the age of 18.

Although the pretty Minnesota-born blonde Grant appeared in less than 40 XXX tapes during her short carnal career (“Shauna Grant Superstar” “Summer Camp Girls,” “Suburban Lust” were some of her titles), she was seen by many as the first real “porn celebrity,” coming into prominence at time of technological transition from film to video, and was considered the leading lady of her era.

The recovered photos show Grant in various types of outfits, poses, and photographic situations never before caught on-camera. Ranging from playing with her dog, to bikini, underwear and other soft and glamour-style set-ups, the shots—which include some nudes—clearly demonstrate her desire to re-invent herself with a portfolio of non-X-rated material. According to Kincaid, a number of the shots, which did not come out well, can now be optically enhanced to bring out the lost images in full.

“Her make-up was done that day by Lori Smith, a fellow porn star, and best friend. But we purposely did her make-up in a very subdued and clean ‘non-porn’ way, so that she would look beautiful, not trashy. They are really one-of-a-kind, and show Shauna in a way she has never been seen before,” according to Kincaid.

Kincaid’s www.pinup4u.com auction site is a one-of-a-kind website offering for sale the hundreds of thousands of photographs, negatives and contact sheets he has taken since 1964 of thousands of porn stars, models and strippers from all over the world—known as “The Kincaid Collection.” The shots range from X-rated to cheesecake-type pix running the gamut from the most famous erotic entertainers of the past half-century, to many never-before-seen ‘amateurs’ who shot with Kincaid once, and never again.