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The 7 best photography books of 2024


I first met Maya Meissner in 2019, during the portfolio reviews at the Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. It ended up being nothing but a typical meeting. Meissner had a story for me and I was thinking of creating a book that would tell this story in every photographic medium imaginable, like a visual diary. A very personal and ominous visual diary.

Meissner told a dark story that she and her family narrowly escaped a serial killer in the late 1990s-The Yosemite Killer. I was captivated. I couldn’t wait for this true crime scrapbook to come to life. This year, he released – a stunning and intimate collection that he called The Cedar Lodge.

The best part of this book? Is it right photos, then a small insert at the end with all the words you need to know to understand the historical incident of Meissner. The photography and design is so strange, anyone would know that this is not your normal collection of photos – it is definitely a documentary of something personal and sinister.

In 1999, Cedar Lodge owner 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 and her parents and 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 shouted at the intruder and scared him.

Meissner and her sister were kept in the dark about this near-fatal night until their mother finally revealed the family secret in 2014. Since then, she has collected articles and archival footage that her parents captured from the trip of 1999. It was also captured original photography of the current landscapes of Yosemite, the cold forest that surrounds the scene of the crime.

More than 10 years later, Meissner’s The Cedar Lodge it serves as a visual compendium of that work, its imagery and design carefully considered to be sensitive to the victims and their surviving families.

Meissner’s dedication at the beginning of the book speaks to everyone: “For my mother for sharing her demons with me and bravely allowing me to share them with the world. For my father, for being our protector and encouraging my adventures. For my sister, for being by my side through everything. And especially, for Carole, Juli and Joie. – Anna Goldwater Alexander



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