I first met Maya Meissner in 2019, during portfolio reviews at the Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. It ended up being anything but a typical meeting. Meissner had a story for me and was planning to create a book that would tell this story in every photographic medium imaginable, like a visual diary. A very personal and sinister visual diary.
Meissner told a dark story about her and her family narrowly escaping a serial killer in the late 1990s.The Yosemite Killer. I felt captivated. I couldn’t wait for this true crime scrapbook to come to life. This year he launched it: an impressive and intimate collection that he called The Cedar Lodge.
The best part of this book? Is fair photographs, then a small insert at the end with all the words you need to know to understand the historic Meissner incident. The photography and design are so haunting that anyone would know that this is no ordinary collection of photographs; It is definitely a documentary about something personal and sinister.
In 1999, Cedar Lodge maintenance staff Cary Stayner killed a woman and two children at the motel near Yosemite National Park (authorities later found another female victim). Months before this horrible crime, Maya, her parents, and her sister were guests at the Cedar Lodge where, in the middle of the night, a man tried to break into their hotel room. His father yelled at the intruder and scared him.
Meissner and his sister knew nothing about this almost fateful night until their mother finally revealed the family secret to him in 2014. Since then, he has been collecting archival articles and films that his parents captured during the 1999 trip. He has also been capturing original photographs of the current landscapes of Yosemite, the chilling forest surrounding the crime scene.
More than ten years later, Meissner The Cedar Lodge serves as a visual compendium of that work, its images and design were carefully considered to be sensitive to the victims and their surviving families.
Meissner’s dedication at the beginning of the book speaks to everyone: “To my mom for sharing her demons with me and bravely allowing me to share them with the world. For my dad, for being our protector and encouraging my adventures. For my sister, for being by my side through all of this. And, above all, for Carole, Juli, Silvina and Joie.” —Anna Goldwater Alejandro