Food images in Delisle’s Hostage and in Stanford University’s project Flying Kites: Towards a prison esthiography

This article investigates food’s plural significance in two graphic narratives based on real events: Guy Delisle’s Hostage and Stanford University’s project Flying Kites: A Story of the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strike . Both works employ food imagery to expose, on the one hand, human rights violations and, on the other, to explore the formation of prisoner identity under conditions of solitary confinement. Through a combined visual and cultural analysis, the study introduces the concept of esthiography – the graphic representation of food – as a lens through which power relations, resilience and resistance are articulated. Hostage recounts the captivity of Christophe André, a French administrator abducted and isolated, while Flying Kites centres on the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strike. In both cases, food functions at the same time as an instrument of control and as a cognitive mechanism. In the former, it signifies coercion and deprivation; in the latter, it becomes a symbolic vehicle for communication and the reclamation of social identity. By juxtaposing absence with imaginative recollection, these narratives depict food not only as a disciplinary tool but also as a means of sustaining personal agency and relational bonds. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the polysemic nature of food in graphic storytelling, highlighting its capacity to document systemic abuse and enable symbolic resistance – thus contributing to the fields of critical prison studies and graphic narrative scholarship.