Harry Kaplan Makes a Quilt

Interestingly, photographers did not only feature women with quilts. Here Russell Lee posed Harry Kaplan, a previously unemployed garment worker, with his quilt assembled from scraps of suiting at the garment factory in  Jersey Homestead, a cooperative established as part of New Deal to resettle urban Jewish garment workers, with a working farm and factory, essentially a government created factory town. Jersey Homestead’s primary industry was a garment factory, and here, Harry Kaplan is using scraps to make this quilt, harking back to the well-documented wool quilts made my male tailors and soldiers in the nineteenth century.