©Maya Meissner, The Cedar Lodge Cut Out Book Cover

When I was growing up, crime was not as ever present as it is today, or at least it wasn’t something that entered into my day to day life. But there were some sensational events that came very close to my family. The second night of the Charles Manson murder spree took place three doors away from a party my parents were attending, and unfortunately the only La Bianca family member to survive (because he was at a friend’s sleep over) went to my school. I’ll never forget the day he came back to school and I’ll never forget my father moving a chest of drawers to block the front door in order to secure us from possible intruders.

When Andrew Fedynak, the publisher of Zatara Press, sent me a copy of  The Cedar Lodge, I had no idea of the subject matter, but was immediately impressed by the creative and innovative book design. At the very end of the book, a small notebook is bound in, telling the story of Maya Meissner‘s own experience with crime, a crime I remember well, as women in California were told not to go to Yosemite without male accompaniment.

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.

©Maya Meissner, Spread from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

©Maya Meissner, Spread from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

©Maya Meissner, Spread from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

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.

Instagram: @mayameissner

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

The publisher shares: 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.

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

Tell us about your growing up and what brought you to photography.

I grew up in a small town in the Bay Area with parents that were gardeners by profession, and musicians by passion. It was a creative household and from an early age I mostly wanted to make things, whether it was a comic book, a play with my sister, a sculpture, or a stop motion film. My dad loved documenting his gardens and his daughters on his Minolta SRT 101, which later became my first film camera. My interest in photography began playing with my dad’s camera, and later with my middle-school early-aughts point-and-shoot Nikon Coolpix, but it really grew and was nourished by my high school photography teacher, Jeffrey Martz. Mr. Martz was a quirky and brilliant teacher with an unbridled passion for photography that was incredibly contagious. I spent a significant amount of my last two years of high school experimenting in the darkroom and falling in love with analog photography and all its possibilities. By the time college applications rolled around I knew I wanted to go somewhere I could focus on photography, and that ended up bringing me to SVA (The School of Visual Arts) in New York City, where I still live now.

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

You are based in New York, what made you want to create a narrative and book about something that happened in California in the 1990’s?

The inspiration for my book, The Cedar Lodge comes from my own family’s experience on a trip we took to Yosemite in 1998. I had never really considered the trip too much until in 2014 my mom called to share with me that on this trip we had had a close-encounter with the Yosemite Killer. My mom, dad, sister (age 5) and I (age 7) had stayed at a hotel called The Cedar Lodge, and in the middle of the night a man tried to break into our room. My dad, who was sleeping closest to the window, heard the attempted intruder and started yelling, which scared the man away. My sister and I slept through the whole thing. My parents reported the incident and checked out of the hotel. Five months later, in 1999, a mother, her teenage daughter, and their teenage friend were murdered in Yosemite, and the last place they were seen was The Cedar Lodge. The police and FBI struggled to find a killer, and another 5 months later a fourth young woman was killed in Yosemite. The killer of the two women and two girls ended up being Cary Stayner, the handyman who lived and worked at The Cedar Lodge. For obvious reasons my parents didn’t feel the need to share this story with my sister and I at the time, though it weighed heavy on them for years as the story was on the news regularly, and they even ended up filing a deposition in the civil suit that followed the criminal proceedings.

When my mom called to share this story with me it was because she realized that she had unresolved PTSD from the incident, so she thought it was time to openly talk about it with me. But what did this mean for me? What was my place on the sidelines of this tragedy? What does it mean to be unaware of possibly having been near-death? Had this indirectly effected me through my parents? And how could such a horrible thing have happened in one of the most beautiful places on earth? I was flummoxed to say the least, so I began researching the story, saving and collecting photos I found along the way. I’ve always used my art to process my feelings, so it was very natural for me to begin creating collages with these found images, layering them with vintage imagery of Yosemite and some of my own family snapshots. It quickly became clear to me that this was a bigger project, and that I needed to travel back to  photograph Yosemite and The Cedar Lodge. I ended up going back twice to make photos for the project, once in the summer of 2014 and once in the winter of 2016. In between these trips I would edit the photographs and continue making collages from my Brooklyn studio, trying to build multiple perspectives from which to examine this story.

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

Can you share a bit about the story of Cary Anthony Stayner, the man who murdered four women in Yosemite? His own experience with traumatic crime is fascinating.

Cary Stayer grew up in Merced California, the eldest of 5 siblings in a Mormon home. When his younger brother Steven was 7 years old he was kidnapped by a child molester named Kenneth Parnell. Steven was told that his parents didn’t want him anymore, and that Parnell was his new father. For 7 years Parnell moved around rural towns in northern California abusing and brainwashing Steven. Meanwhile, back at the Stayer home the family struggled to face the reality of Steven being gone. When Steven was about 14 years old Kenneth decided to kidnap another much younger boy, a 5 year old named Timothy White. This was a sort-of wake-up call for Steven, as he realized that he didn’t want this kid to go through what he had gone through, so in the middle of the night Steven escaped and carried Timothy to the nearest police station. Steven successfully returned Timothy to his family and returned to his own family as a national hero. At the time it was the longest case of kidnapping on record. There was even a TV movie made about him called “I know my name is Steven.” Cary was happy to have his brother home, but also felt jealous of the spotlight. The whole family struggled to reconcile the kid Steven had left as, and the young man he returned as. The family didn’t seek out therapy for anyone, not even Steven who had been abused for 7 years. Steven even joked with the press that all the interviews he had to give were his version of therapy. While many people like to associate Cary’s murderous nature with this event that obviously rocked his childhood, Cary confessed to authorities that he had fantasized about abducting and killing women since age 7, long before Steven’s kidnapping.

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

I’d love to have you talk about your book design – The design is fairly complex, how did you bring the different parts of the project together?

I knew very early on in making this project that the final result would be a book because of both the narrative and personal nature of it. I find the relationship of viewer to artwork to be much more intimate with a book, rather than a series of prints. I wanted to create something that could provide that sort of direct and consuming connection. As I worked on the project it became clear that the book design would be challenging. I chose to approach the project through a variety of mediums and styles to illustrate the varying perspectives on the story, and the way all these stories crossed paths at The Cedar Lodge. I had color photography shot in daylight, black and white photography shot at night with a flash, a large variety of collages utilizing office materials, tourist paraphernalia, and family album ephemera, and then I also had a series of censored newspaper spreads. Oh and there was also an album of altered family photography! It was almost like I was combining 5 books into one.

I am very lucky that the man I chose to spend my life with, Lorenzo Fanton, happens to be a fantastic designer with a passion for photobooks. While I worked on the project he gave me my space to make the project whatever it needed to be, and then when I felt the work was done that’s when the collaboration on the design began. We started with editing and sequencing, choosing the best photographs and collages, eliminating ones that felt redundant or didn’t hold up next to stronger images. We often talked about the sequence like a film with multiple stories woven into one. The collages were the narrative structure, so we sequenced them roughly chronologically based on what part of the story they represented to me. The color photographs were like my character’s story, grounded in the present, trying to get closer to what happened in the past. We start the color photography sequence with my landscape photographs of Yosemite- majestic nature in all it’s glory. Then the photographs come closer, arriving at The Cedar Lodge property, exploring the complex of buildings nestled along the canyon of granite. And then the sequence brings you to the interior photographs, the rooms of the hotel where it all happened. The place that holds the mystery is where the book ends. We played with size and rhythm as we wove the collages in with the photographs.  The final visual element we brought into the book was my series of black and white images. These images felt like memories, perhaps mine, perhaps the killer’s, perhaps the investigator’s, perhaps the victims’. Lorenzo had the brilliant idea to place the black and white images in gate-folds so that the viewer has to lift up the colorful image to find the dark, more off-putting photo underneath. This solution felt perfect to me on multiple levels, firstly it required the viewer to interact more with the work, to literally uncover the story like I had for myself in my investigation. Secondly, it referenced the layers of history, and the darker story behind the beautiful location of Yosemite. If it was a David Lynch film, the black and whites would be the freaky moments after a burst of white light.

We tried various ways of incorporating the censored newspaper spreads in the book itself, but ultimately decided that they were strongest as their own newspaper zine, which I released in 2018 as a prequel to the book. The zine combines real newspaper spreads from 1999 that had stories about the Yosemite killings where I had censored out all unrelated text (leaving all the images) with 35mm black and white photographs I had taken as a teen in Yosemite. I call these photographs my “naive landscapes” since I shot them as a young photo student still learning my way around a camera, and because I was unaware of my family’s history with Yosemite at the time. Now when you order the book you get the zine as a free supplement. It provides the viewer with context for the project, and an idea of just how big the story of the Yosemite killings was.

The final design element I want to mention is the booklet. While the zine provided some historical context I wanted to give the viewer access to more of the narrative behind the visuals, and to have it within the book itself. We discussed having text throughout the book and we tried having text in the beginning, but ultimately decided that we wanted a little more mystery, and I wanted to give the images a chance to stand on their own. We achieved this by making a miniature booklet of text that is mounted on the interior back cover of the book. The text inside is written by me, but in a very dry journalistic tone. Each “chapter” of the booklet is started with a reproduction of one of the collages, and the text that follows is the part of the story I associate with the collage. The viewer can choose how much they want to know, and how much they want to remain a mystery.

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

The book has received international recognition.  The 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. What was the process of getting it published?

Since I am a first time author I was quite intimidated by trying to get my book published. Some photographer friends recommended starting by investing in making my own book dummy, and submitting it into competitions to get some traction for the project, hopefully to prove my vision to publishers. Since Lorenzo and I had come up with a complete design of the book this felt like a natural path to take. I had the book printed, folded the pages myself, and then had it bound by the NYC legend, Henry Street Bookbinding (look him up). We started with a dummy edition of 5, which eventually expanded into an edition of 8. I spent most of 2018 researching dummy competitions and shipping my dummies back and forth across the world, hoping for a publishing deal. How most of these competitions work is that if you win first place you get a publishing deal with the publisher that sponsors the competition. Unfortunately I didn’t win any publishing deal, but as you mentioned I got shortlisted and noticed at a good handful of these festivals. This recognition gave me the confidence and credibility to then begin approaching publishers directly with my book proposal, which is how I spent 2019. It still wasn’t easy, despite the success I’d had with the dummy competitions. As a first time author my name was pretty much unknown, and I was pitching an expensive and complex project. I got lots of very nice versions of “it’s great but no thanks.” The nicest and longest version of this rejection came from Andrew Fedynak of the Richmond-based publisher, Zatara Press. He was interested in the project but it was very different from the rest of Zatara’s catalog, which is all straight photography books designed by the publisher himself. It wasn’t the right fit, but we decided to meet in person anyway when we realized we would both be in Portland for Photolucida. When Andrew saw the physical dummy it changed his mind completely. I sent him home with an extra copy so he could mull it over, and within a few months he emailed to say he was in. The plan was to publish it in the fall of 2020…. But we all know how 2020 went. So I had a bunch of delays before it was actually published (a long story for another day). Then in September of 2024 I finally had The Cedar Lodge published. 10 years after I began the project. It’s been a real labor of love and I’m so proud of how it turned out. I couldn’t have done it without the help of Lorenzo and his design expertise, Andrew for his endless support, and Jose of SYL who printed and bound the book in Spain.

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

What is next for you?

I’m really excited to not be working on a project about murder! Hah! But in all seriousness, I have a couple things that have been on the back-burner I am excited to bring into fruition. I don’t want to go into too much detail, as I am still figuring out what these projects are (or if maybe they will become one?) But I will say that they will have a much looser narrative. If The Cedar Lodge was a photography novel, my next project will be a collection of photography poetry.

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

©Maya Meissner, from The Cedar Lodge, published by Zatara Press

Books can be ordered through the artist HERE or through Zatara Press HERE.

Unsigned copies retail for $60/€60/£50 + Shipping.

Signed copies are also available for a retail price of $65/€65/£55 + Shipping.

Please inquire directly with us about how Bookstores, Libraries, and Institutions can purchase this book at a Wholesale Discount + Shipping. Bulk Discounts are also available.

Book Specifications:

170 x 250 mm or 6.75 x 9.8 inches

80 B+W and Color Images

154 pages + Cover with Essay Booklet

Hardcover

Zatara Press

2024

ISBN: 978-1-7338406-4-4

Trade Edition: 300 Copies

Design By Lorenzo Fanton

Zatara Press is an independent photobook imprint based around the medium of “Uniquely Designed and Collaboratively Crafted Artist’s Styled Photobooks”. Started by Andrew Fedynak (Hartford MFA 2014), all of our projects are produced in Richmond, Virginia, and they are printed in many places around the world. To ZP, photobooks are poetic art objects as well as statements or narratives. Our design principles are based around the Japanese aesthetic view of Wabi-Sabi. A more in-depth expression of these design statements can be found on ourwebsite.

Instagram: @ zatarapress