A 200-year-old faded picture of a leaf, stylish shots of glamorous fashion models, an array of long-lost freak-show snaps - all could make big money at next week's photography sales in New York, where more than 1,000 lots convey the enormous diversity of taste for which this market now caters.

	Sophisticated: Mouth for L’Oréal (1986) by Irving Penn

The most intriguing is the picture of the leaf. Bought in London in 1984 for about £6,000, it was thought by the buyer, New York dealer Hans P Kraus, to be a photogenic drawing (an image traced by solar rays of an object placed on light-sensitive paper) of c.1839 by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the founding fathers of photography. As such it would now be worth between £50,000 and £75,000, according to Sotheby's photography expert Denise Bethel.

But independent scholar Dr Larry J Schaaf, who has written the sale catalogue entry, thinks it might have been made more than 20 years earlier, possibly by Thomas Wedgwood, a member of the Wedgwood china family, who first started experimenting with primitive forms of photography in the 1790s. This would make it the oldest photograph in existence.

No examples of Wedgwood's photographs are known to have survived, so this, says Bethel, might be "one of the most important discoveries in the history of photography". As such, she adds, "the sky could be the limit" in terms of prices, so no price guide has been given. The record for a photograph was set two years ago when Edward Steichen's The Pond-Moonlight (1904) sold for £1.4m.

The leaf picture is part of the sale of the Quillan collection, formed by an investment group during the late Eighties to "represent photography's achievements from its beginnings to the near present". Especially strong on 19th-century photographs, it also includes rare experimental 20th-century works and just touches on celebrity pictures with Richard Avedon's understated 1957 portrait of Marilyn Monroe (£35,000 to £50,000).

source:www.telegraph.co.uk

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Sheetal Menon:-

Model Sheetal Menon will kickstart her film career in Pavan Kaul's thriller, Bhram. The cast also includes Dino Morea, Milind Soman, Simone Singh and Chetan Hansraj.

Sheetal has been a Kingfisher calendar gal, appeared in music videos and also done quite a few advertisements. In Bhram, she plays a struggling model, who falls in love with a suave.




Sheetal Mallar

Sheetal has been a known and successful face in the modelling world since she won the Femina Look of the Year in 1994.

Yet, the supermodel has not tried her hand in the movies until Yogendra Singh's Kabhi Bhi Kabhi Bhi came along. Apparently, she was just not interested earlier. Looks like she's finally changed her mind.










Sonal Chauhan

Paired opposite Emraan Hashmi, Sonal replaced Esha Deol in Kunal Deshmukh's Jannat.

A model and an ex-Miss India beauty pageant contestant, Sonal was crowned the Miss World Tourism 2005 in Malaysia.

Hailing from Uttar Pradesh, Jannat will be Sonal's first big screen experience. (source:rediff.com)

entrepreneur (played by Dino).

A married man who used to be a woman says that he is pregnant and will give birth to a baby girl in July.

“How does it feel to be a pregnant man? Incredible,” wrote Thomas Beatie, 34, from the Pacific North West of the United States, in the latest issue of the gay magazine The Advocate.

“Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am.”

Mr Beatie was born female, named Tracy Lagondino, but had gender reassignment surgery and is now legally male and married to a woman.

He decided to carry a baby for his wife, Nancy, because she had a hysterectomy years ago. He was able to get pregnant because he kept his female organs when he switched genders.

“Sterilisation is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights,” he writes. “Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire but a human desire.” The couple, who have been together for ten years, run a custom screenprinting business in Bend, Oregon, where neighbours do not know that Mr Beatie was once a woman.

Source:timesonline.co.uk

The smell of spring is in the air. After rich winter clothing many are impatient to finally free their bodies. Those whose wardrobes are not filled with little, thin summer items will be forced to go shopping.

For this summer, renowned international designers agreed unanimously over one item: dresses with prints. Designers found the inspiration for the prints in abstract and cubism paintings or blooming meadows. Femininity comes first. We recommend even those who always wear trousers to try long dresses or silky, one-piece overalls launched by Miuccia Prada and Cavalli, and which seem so gentle and feminine as dresses do.

Dress as art

All those girls who want to be noticed will turn on the alarm on a piece of fabric and turn it into a small sculpture. This dress is also called ‘the item that wears you’. That was the entire Balenciagi collection whose dresses looked like body armour. Basso & Brooke and Dolce & Gabbana played with abstract prints, spicing them up with frills and volume. Giles took his inspiration from asphalt, the city and modern art, as well as in nature, layering collages and forming new volume. John Galliano brought an air of theatre costumes of the old Hollywood and turned a woman into a seductive Lolita. The mythological world of nymphs was Prada’s view with Greek gods transforming all the forces of nature into beautiful dresses.

Come des Garcons as usual suggested dresses with shifts in construction and seem unadjusted, punk-like for this world. Choose eveningwear as the moment of transformation into a piece of art, until then leave your pumpkin in the wardrobe.

Dresses for the pure and innocent, as well as not so pure and innocent

The coming warm days, apart from the sun and the red-hot asphalt, announce romantic little dresses in which girls will introduce an air of nature into grey cities. Flaunting designs of silky fabrics that reveal little, but outline a lot, present a cult of innocence and purity, unrealistic dreamers walking the urban world – between dream and the real world. In his collection for spring/summer Roberto Cavalli placed his animal print on the background and presented impressionistic goddesses in floral dresses that outline the feminine silhouette. Junya Watanabe, Stella McCartney, Etro, Marc Jacobs, Blumarine and Matthew Williamson also brought the cult flower children to the catwalks. The medicinal white monotony was transformed into ethno-embroidery and floral prints and the most important role have ethereal natural fabrics such as cotton, gauze, silk and muslin that allow the skin to breathe.

Rock me baby

Tight, short and sexy is the suggestion of rare designers for the coming sunny days. It seems that the high degree of urbanism instinctively forced artists to contemplate the old saying: if the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain. So designers transformed nature into their design and enriched urban metropolises with fashion. But, Miu Miu, Diesel, Clare Tough, Anna Sui, Castelbajac and Heatherette are the rare ones who stayed faithful to sexy little dresses that cling tight to the body and say: Rock me baby.

Art collector Charles Saatchi is a fraction of the man he used to be after losing nearly four stone on a new vegetarian diet.

Now his glamorous wife Nigella Lawson, 48, is following suit after piling on the pounds.'

The domestic goddess, who admits to a weakness for calorific treats, has embarked on an intense exercise regime in a bid to lose weight.

Source:dailymail.co.uk

The smallest bikini we have found so far is this model from . There are smaller models available, but they don't cover the vital parts and so we don't consider them true bikinis

While surfers search all over the World Wide Web for the photos that Calum Best reportedly took of a bare backed and full frontal Lindsay Lohan it looks like she was taking a look at Criss Angel. She may need a little magic to get rid of what may be a bigger scandal than the Vanessa Minnillo pics.

An anonymous sender just blasted the picture to "That Other Blog." They've censored it down to give it a PG-13 rating They as, "Is this Lindsay?" The buzz overnight was that according to a supposedly real between the dude that runs Celeb slam.com and Lindsay Lohan, someone allegedly hacked into her computer and stole some pictures that Calum Best had taken of her that show lots of skin.

To add to Lindsay's woes fresh out of rehab, Girls Talkin' Smack report that she was with the Las Vegas illusionsist this weekend.

More: "You would think with all the bad press Criss Angel has been getting after his little romp with Cameron Diaz, that he would try and stay out of the headlines for while. Not so. This weekend he was seen partying at Pure Nightclub with Lindsay Lohan and the camera’s even caught one blurry photo of him going back to her suite. I’m sure they just went up to play Yahtzee though."