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 ebook telling this story in each images medium possible, like a visible diary. A really private and ominous visible diary.
Meissner instructed 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 return to life. This 12 months, she launched it—a shocking and intimate assortment she named The Cedar Lodge.
The perfect half about this ebook? It’s simply images, then a wee insert on the very finish with all of the phrases you’ll want to know to know Meissner’s historic incident. The images and design is so eerie, anybody would know that this isn’t your regular assortment of images—it’s undoubtedly a documentary of one thing private and sinister.
In 1999, the Cedar Lodge’s handyman, Cary Stayner, killed a girl and two kids on the motel close to Yosemite Nationwide Park (authorities later discovered one other feminine sufferer). Months previous to this horrific crime, Maya and her mother and father and sister have been friends on the Cedar Lodge the place, in the course of the night time, 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 stored at nighttime about this almost-fateful night time till her mom lastly revealed the household secret to her in 2014. Since then, she’s been gathering articles and archival movie her mother and father captured from the 1999 journey. She’s additionally been capturing unique images 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 of so as to be delicate to the victims and their surviving households.
Meissner’s dedication to start with of the ebook 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 by all of it. And most of all, for Carole, Juli, Silvina, and Joie.” —Anna Goldwater Alexander
