The 7 Best Photography Books of 2024

I first met Maya Meisner in 2019, while reviewing her portfolio at the Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. It ended up being anything but a typical meeting. Meissner had a story for me and was planning to create a book that told that story in every photographic medium imaginable, like a visual memoir. A very personal and ominous visual diary.

Meissner told a dark story about her and her family narrowly escaping a serial killer in the late 1990s.Yosemite Killer. I was captivated. I couldn’t wait for my true crime scrapbook to come to life. She launched this year, a stunning and intimate collection that she named after Cedar Lodge.

The best part about this book? that it only Photographs, and then a small insert at the end with all the words you need to know to understand the historic Meissner Incident. The photography and design are so strange, that anyone can tell that this is not your ordinary collection of photographs – this is definitely a documentary about something personal and sinister.

In 1999, Cedar Lodge handyman Cary Stayner murdered a woman and two children at the hotel near Yosemite National Park (authorities later found another victim). Months before this horrific crime, Maya, her parents, and her sister were guests at the Cedar Lodge Hotel, where, in the middle of the night, a man attempted to break into their hotel room. Her father shouted at the intruder and frightened him.

Meissner and her sister were kept in the dark about that near-fateful night until her mother finally revealed the family secret to her in 2014. Since then, she has collected archival articles and films her parents took from the 1999 trip. She has also taken original photographs of Yosemite’s current landscape , and the horrific forest surrounding the crime scene.

More than 10 years later, Meissner Cedar Lodge Serving as a visual distillation of this work, its imagery and design have been carefully considered and designed to keep the victims and their surviving families in mind.

Meissner’s dedication at the beginning of the book speaks to them all: “To my mother for sharing her demons with me and allowing me to share them with the world so bravely. To my father, for being our protector and encouraging my adventures. For my sister, for being by my side through it all. And most of all, for Carol, Julie, Sylvina, and Joy.” —Anna Goldwater Alexander