Longing for Amelia

On May 20, 1937, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Oakland, California on the first leg of their historic round-the-world flight. They disappeared 43 days later while trying to locate tiny Howland Island in the remote Pacific. 83 years after Earhart’s disappearance her legend survives in the many individuals still searching for evidence of what happened to her on that fateful day in 1937.
With this photographic project, Matthew Arnold documents the environs that play host to the many theories which attempt to resolve the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. The work presented here is from the first stage of Arnold’s project—a five-week expedition to the outer reaches of the Northern Mariana and Marshall Islands, photographing the seascapes and landscapes specific to the “Japanese Capture” theory. It is a theory that involves a forced landing in fortified Japanese territory followed by capture, imprisonment, and possible execution at the hands of their Imperial Navy.