I first met Maya Meissner in 2019, during a portfolio review at the Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. In the end it was no longer a typical encounter. Meissner had a story for me and was planning to create a book telling this story using every photographic medium imaginable, like a visual diary. A very personal and ominous visual diary.
Meissner tells a dark story of how she and her family narrowly escaped a serial killer in the late 1990s—The Yosemite Killer. I was captivated. I can't wait for this true crime scrapbook to come out. This year, she released it—a beautiful and intimate collection she titled Cedar Lodge.
The best part about this book? Its only photos, then a small insert at the end with all the words you need to know to understand Meissner's historical event. The imagery and design are so strange, anyone would know that this isn't your average photo collection—it's definitely a documentary about something personal and sinister.
In 1999, Cedar Lodge housekeeper Cary Stayner killed a woman and two children at the lodge near Yosemite National Park (authorities later found another female victim). Months before this horrific crime, Maya, her parents and her sister were guests at Cedar Lodge, where in the middle of the night, a man tried to break into their hotel room. Her father scolded the intruder and scared him.
Meissner and her sister knew nothing about this almost fateful night until her mother revealed the family secret to her in 2014. Since then, she has been collecting articles and archival footage that her father her mother captured footage from the 1999 trip. She was also taking original photos of Yosemite's present-day landscape, the cold forest surrounding the crime scene.
More than 10 years later, Meissner's Cedar Lodge serving as a visual summary of that work, its imagery and design were carefully considered to be sensitive to the victims and their surviving families.
Meissner’s dedication at the beginning of the book says it all: “To my mother for sharing her demons with me and for having the courage to let me share them with the world. For my dad, for being the protector and encourager of my adventures. For my sister, for being by my side through it all. And most of all for Carole, Juli, Silvina and Joie.” —Anna Goldwater Alexander