I first met Maya Meissner in 2019, throughout portfolio evaluations on the Filter Photograph Pageant in Chicago. It ended up being something however a typical assembly. Meissner had a narrative for me and was planning on making a guide telling this story in each pictures medium conceivable, like a visible diary. A really private and ominous visible diary.
Meissner advised a darkish story about her and her household narrowly escaping a serial killer within the late Nineteen Nineties—The Yosemite Killer. I used to be captivated. I couldn’t await this true-crime scrapbook to come back to life. This 12 months, she launched it—a surprising and intimate assortment she named The Cedar Lodge.
The most effective half about this guide? It’s simply images, then a wee insert on the very finish with all of the phrases you might want to know to grasp Meissner’s historic incident. The pictures and design is so eerie, anybody would know that this isn’t your regular assortment of images—it’s positively a documentary of one thing private and sinister.
In 1999, the Cedar Lodge’s handyman, Cary Stayner, killed a girl and two youngsters on the motel close to Yosemite Nationwide Park (authorities later discovered one other feminine sufferer). Months previous to this horrific crime, Maya and her dad and mom and sister have been company on the Cedar Lodge the place, in the midst of the evening, a person tried to interrupt into their lodge room. Her father yelled on the intruder and scared him off.
Meissner and her sister have been saved at midnight about this almost-fateful evening till her mom lastly revealed the household secret to her in 2014. Since then, she’s been gathering articles and archival movie her dad and mom captured from the 1999 journey. She’s additionally been capturing unique pictures of present Yosemite landscapes, the chilling forest surrounding the crime scene.
Greater than 10 years later, Meissner’s The Cedar Lodge serves as a visible compendium of that work, its imagery and design fastidiously thought-about so as to be delicate to the victims and their surviving households.
Meissner’s dedication to start with of the guide speaks to all of them: “For my mother for sharing her demons with me and bravely letting me share them with the world. For my dad, for being our protector and inspiring my adventures. For my sister, for being by my facet via all of it. And most of all, for Carole, Juli, Silvina, and Joie.” —Anna Goldwater Alexander
