Maya Meissner
Maya Meissner
The Cedar Lodge
154 pages
170 x 250 mm or 6.75 x 9.8 inches
80 B+W and Color Images
Hardcover
Zatara Press
2024
About the Book:
Maya Meissner’s The Cedar Lodge tells a disturbing dream-like story of her family’s close encounter with the Yosemite Killer in the late 1990s. The project consists of artistic photographic materials from a variety of sources, such as collages, photographs taken as a teenager, altered family snapshots, and additional new photographs made in and around the hotel where the events happened. Through these varied perspectives, Meissner investigates her discomfort, grief, confusion, and separation from the twist of fate that intertwined her with these events.
Design by Lorenzo Fanton
Maya Meissner is an artist living in New York working within the mediums of photography, collage, installation, books, and performance. Her work often deals with personal histories relating to family, landscape, and the explicit relationship of the photograph as evidence. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, and was honored with the Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Achievement in Photography. Meissner’s book dummy for The Cedar Lodge won a FUAM Dummy Book Award Special Prize at the 2018 Istanbul Photobook Festival, and 2nd place in the 2018 Cosmos-Arles PDF Award. It was also short listed as a finalist in competitions for the Unseen Dummy Award, Cortona on the Move Photobook Prize, Singapore International Photography Festival, and Fiebre Photobook Festival. In 2019, Meissner was selected as a Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 Finalist. Her art and photography have been exhibited in galleries and festivals around the world.
Book review by Dana Stirling |
first met Maya back in 2019 at the Photolucida portfolio reviews. She arrived with her book mockup, slightly worn from handling, but full of character and charm. Her passion for the project radiated through every word she spoke, drawing me in instantly. The book itself was a reflection of that passion—captivating, layered, and deeply engaging. It’s been a few years since that first meeting, and I’ve eagerly awaited the day I could hold the finished book in my hands. That day has finally come.
Maya’s book is an intricate weave of found footage, archival images, research, and personal family memories, coming together in a way that feels both intimate and expansive.
For context, the Yosemite killer, Cary Stayner, was responsible for a series of horrifying murders near Yosemite National Park in 1999. Stayner, a handyman at a nearby motel, killed four women, including Carole Sund, her daughter Juli, their friend Silvina Pelosso, and naturalist Joie Armstrong. These brutal killings shook the nation, casting a dark shadow over the picturesque, serene landscapes of Yosemite. Stayner’s troubled background only deepened the intrigue and public fascination with the case, and he was eventually convicted, remaining on death row. This case, infamous for its setting and senseless violence, disrupted the notion of nature as a safe, peaceful refuge.
I share this background because it’s central to Maya’s work, which is not a documentary retelling but rather a deeply personal and poetic reflection on these events. Maya’s family had a close, unsettling encounter with the killer, and this proximity to such horror imbues her book with a haunting sense of intimacy. It’s more than just a recounting of events—it’s a reckoning with memory, place, and trauma on a personal level.
In the book, Maya uses a blend of archival imagery, her own photography, and family photos to create a narrative that is both emotionally raw and intellectually complex. On one hand, it captures the confusion and grief that accompany such tragedy, but it also offers an alternative perspective on the crime—one that moves beyond the sensationalism of true crime media. Unlike most true crime content, which tends to focus on the gruesome details and psychological dissection of the criminal, Maya’s approach is different. It shifts the gaze toward the place itself—the landscape, the lodge, and the loss of innocence in a location where people seek solace in nature, only to find that it too can be tainted by human violence.
The book feels like a diary, filled with fragmented memories of someone trying to make sense of a story that surrounds them but is just out of reach. There’s a sense of searching—an attempt to understand the pieces without fully possessing them, as though some things are too painful to grasp in their entirety. It is enigmatic in parts, straightforward in others, always maintaining a delicate balance between withholding and revealing.
One of the most striking aspects of the book is its design. The use of gatefold pages, where images are partially hidden and then revealed, mirrors the thematic tension in the narrative. It’s a perfect metaphor for how Maya sees these events and her connection to them—not as a straightforward, cohesive memory, but as something fragmented, layered, and elusive. The design itself embodies the experience of discovery, reflecting how memories, especially traumatic ones, are often concealed, slowly emerging into view over time.
