The Silver Bath

About

Pera, 1896. Meline Barsamian keeps her father's photographic studio on the Grande Rue: a glass roof, a painted balustrade, a silver bath in the darkroom, and four thousand three hundred numbered glass negatives going back to 1871. She photographs brides, officers and dead children, and holds a trade licence that people in this particular year keep asking to see. A censor from the press bureau has quietly renewed that licence for six years, believes he is holding a line between the state's fear and the city's life, and has been in love with her since a sitting in 1890. In March a courier walks in wanting eleven portraits of eleven people who need to be somebody else on paper, thinks Meline's caution is a form of collaboration, and is not wrong. Both of them want the same thing without knowing it: the racks. Because the negatives are not stock, they are a census — four thousand faces with names, dates and addresses written on the sleeves in the photographer's own hand. A studio drama about the physical facts of a trade — collodion, silver nitrate, exposure times under a glass roof, a licence renewal stamp — where the instrument of betrayal is an archive built with love. Nobody here informs on anybody. The arrests happen anyway. Desire between adults is frank and closes the door; the era's violence is present, mostly reported, and never used as spectacle. Five endings, and the archive survives in two of them, which is not the same as the people in it surviving.

Cast

• Meline Barsamian protagonist; photographer, Grande Rue studio
• Cemil Sıtkı Bey censor at the press bureau
• Zabel Kurkjian courier; wants eleven portraits
• Hagop Barsamian Meline's older brother; runs the front of the shop
• Efe the studio's apprentice, 20, sweeps and coats plates
• Madame Kiraz landlady of the building; hears everything on the stair