Robert Longo is an American artist, filmmaker, and photographer. His black-and-white images often feature iconography that elicits equal parts fear and fascination, like the biting shark in Suleimon. These hyper-realistic drawings show the violence present in both man and animals, humanity and nature.

Rather than applying charcoal in additive layers to work from light to dark, Longo first covers the paper in deep, dark layers of charcoal, and adds highlights by progressively removing it. When interviewed by Interview Magazine, Longo stated “I always feel like I’m carving the image out rather than painting the image. I’m carving it out with erasers and tools like that.”