7 Best Photography Books of 2024

I first met Maya Meissner during a portfolio review at the 2019 Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. It was nothing more than an ordinary meeting. Meissner had a story for me and planned to create a book that told that story in every photographic medium imaginable as a visual diary. A very personal and ominous visual diary.

Meissner told a dark tale of his and his family’s escape from a serial killer in the late 1990s –The Yosemite Killer. I was captured. I couldn’t wait for this true crime album to come to life. This year, she released her signature stunning and intimate collection Cedar Lodge.

The best part of this book? this just photos, then add a small appendix at the very end of all the words you need to know to understand Meissner’s historical event. The photography and design are so eerie that anyone can tell this isn’t your normal photo collection – it’s definitely a documentary of something personal and sinister.

In 1999, Cedar Lodge employee Cary Stayner killed a woman and two children at a motel near Yosemite National Park (authorities later found another female victim). Months before this horrific crime, Maya, her parents and her sister were staying at Cedar Lodge when a man tried to break into their hotel room in the middle of the night. His father shouted at the intruder and scared him.

Meissner and her sister kept this near-fatal night in the dark until their mother finally revealed the family secret to her in 2014. Since then, she has been collecting articles and archival film from her parents’ 1999 trip. He also captures original photography of present-day Yosemite landscapes of the cold forest surrounding the crime scene.

After more than 10 years, Meissner Cedar Lodge carefully thought out imagery and design to be sensitive to the victims and their surviving families serves as a visual overview of that work.

Meissner’s dedication at the beginning of the book speaks to them all: “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 in everything. Most of all for Carole, Julie, Silvina and Joie. -Anna Goldwater Alexander