Sangre Blanca—literally ‘White Blood’—takes its title from the substance at the centre of a half-century war, and Mads Nissen approaches that subject not as a scandal but as a system. Photographed between 2016 and 2025, the project follows cocaine from rural Colombia—where, according to UNODC figures cited by the publisher, roughly two-thirds of the world’s supply is produced and where the human cost is heaviest—through Mexico, where trafficking has entangled broad sections of public life, to European dance floors where consumption has grown ordinary. Nissen, a Danish documentary photographer, builds the book around consequence rather than spectacle: who gains, who is displaced, who remains at a safe distance.
The book is a collaboration, and its polyphony is structural. Colombian artist Juan Arreaza contributes expressive oil paintings made partly with chemicals sourced from cocaine laboratories, introducing a second visual voice—nightlife observed in Europe and the United States, and portraits of historical figures who shaped the trade and its wars. Four commissioned essays, by Santiago Rivas, María Jimena Duzán, Henrik Vigh and Luis Chaparro, extend the argument into cultural, journalistic and anthropological registers. Nissen’s own access—to producers, smugglers, law enforcement and organized criminal groups across borders—gives the sequence its documentary spine.
GOST Books issues the work in a 192-page clothbound hardcover with 106 images. That count matters: this is a sustained visual argument assembled over nearly a decade, not a portfolio of isolated shocks. The design and sequencing carry the reader across countries and continents, holding intimate scenes against the political and economic machinery that produces them. Questions of escapism, hedonism, global inequality and neocolonialism run through the whole, along with the harder question of user responsibility.
The publisher presents Sangre Blanca as Nissen’s most substantial body of work to date, and as an unusually layered treatment of a subject too often reduced to crime reporting. Its combination of long-term fieldwork, artistic collaboration and commissioned scholarship gives it a range few photobooks on the drug economy attempt.
