WHITNEY HUBBS

Screenshot of the fire.

Afterimage by Whitney Hubbs:

In my second round of puberty (aka perimenopause) my high school burned down. In February 2025, one week before David Lynch died, and six months before my thirty-year high school reunion, I watched my high school in west L.A. burn down on Instagram live, in my home, in an upstate New York town, during a snowstorm. It didn't feel real, and that makes sense to me. I didn't feel sad, and I'm embarrassed that this also makes sense to me. It felt more real and more sad that David Lynch died. And then I feel sad because I felt closer to David Lynch than I did to my life during high school, or maybe that's normal?

Carrie and Teen Wolf were shot at my high school that burned down. I also found out that the second house I lived in—that a reality tv star lived in with his wife—burned down.. In 2018 I watched the first house I lived in burn down on a livestream YouTube channel, shot from a helicopter. M*A*S*H and Twin Peaks were filmed around that house. I watched that house burn down in a different, but smaller, upstate New York town, and also during a snowstorm.

Back to my high school. I don't see why my locker wouldn't have burned down with the entire school, but that would mean that the photo classroom across from my locker also burned down where the only good memories are from my puberty. I took my first photo class when I was a freshman in 1991. That year I wanted to be a war photographer because my teacher showed us James Nachtwey's War Photographer. But then when I was a sophomore, he showed us Annie Leibovitz's pictures of famous people, like that Keith Haring portrait. I didn't really want to be her, because being Keith Haringg seemed cooler. And when I pretended to be him and made a self-portrait, I got photo of the week.

I am writing this in 2026, and I hear that my high school is holding classes at the empty Sears building in the next town over—a place I shoplifted knock off Doc Marten's from. By the time this second round of puberty hit, both houses from my first eighteen years were incinerated. Both times, I decided not to go back and photograph these places that aren't even places anymore, and instead I had a fun (in a macabre way) writing about it.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal.