By: Michele-Louise Ridley-Cook

La Bonne Vivante-African American Cultural Artifacts, established in 2008, is the brain child of proprietor, curator and docent Michele-Louise Ridley-Cook. In addition to being an e-commerce site, the La Bonne Vivante site is an educational site, which offers descriptions and history of the various categories of material in its inventory, as well as historical and contextual information relating to individual artifacts, when available.

Several artifactual genres are offered by La Bonne Vivante:

• Antique image - (1800s to the 1940s). -  Includes photos of African American families, church groups, children, and couples. There is professional portraiture; many vernacular and “found” photographs. There are cabinet card photos, RPPCs, cartes de visite, and tintypes. African Americans, from various locations, rural and urban, are always the focal point This eclectic and fluid photograph collection features African Americans engaging in the full gamut of life experiences; worshiping, recreating, child-rearing, marrying, mourning.

The photos in the collection contain many hints with regard to times, places, genealogy, names, the lifestyles of those photographed.. Many contain inscriptions or photographer’s marks. Others contain first and or last names.

• Ephemeral offerings -  Include artifacts such as programs, diaries, scrapbooks, sheet music, posters, advertisements, letters, diplomas, and legal documents.  These items lend dimension to the collection.

• Digital services - Include creation of personalized photographic-musical retrospectives and digital antique images for various uses, make access to and preservation of cultural artifacts possible for a diverse range of people.

In addition, La Bonne Vivante creates customized exhibits, offers live presentations and seminars, and facilitates group discussions on the significance and societal impacts of African American cultural artifacts, with emphasis on photographs.

Readers interested in African American history and genealogy, particularly those with roots in the areas from which these artifacts have come, may, as they peruse this collection, see familiar places or faces. If you are interested in the origins of a particular item, do ask what is known about the history surrounding it...they will delight in telling you!

In this vein, La Bonne Vivante has identified and located the African American people featured in a large collection of “found” photographs, memorabilia and ephemera. For example,  they returned the photos home to their Princeton, New Jersey family, the Satterfields.

La Bonne Vivante has also helped to facilitate the return of several images by famed Washington DC photographer Addison Scurlock to his surviving family members.

La Bonne Vivante offers for sale, original African American cultural artifacts, lovingly rescued from estate sales and auctions around the country It is here to serve you and to help facilitate, through their collection, enhanced understanding and broadened perspectives of the African American Diaspora.

This is an outstanding, ever changing, and unusual collection offering many rare items, so visit and enjoy labonnevivante.com!