These nightmare-fuel images are photocopies of Russian passport photos, and they look like rejected concept art for an analog horror series for entirely mundane technical reasons.
When you photocopy a small passport photo, several things go wrong simultaneously. The copier’s scanner crushes the tonal range — subtle gradations of light and shadow become stark black-and-white contrasts, turning eye sockets into voids and cheekbones into skull-like ridges. Fine details blur or vanish entirely while harsh edges get emphasized.
The holographic security features make everything worse. That eagle watermark interacts unpredictably with the scanning light, creating strange artifacts and distortions across the face. Moiré patterns from the original photo printing can also clash with the scanner’s resolution, producing wavy interference effects.
Add in low-quality or aging copier equipment, and you get faces that look like they belong in The Mandela Catalogue or a particularly cursed game of Papers, Please.
One redditor who takes ID photocopies for work confirmed this is entirely normal: “the copies or scans regularly look like something out of a fucking horror movie.” Another noted that the last image features someone whose neck got stretched into giraffe proportions by the distortion.
The aesthetic has become its own thing. Redditors compared them to black metal album covers, Junji Ito manga, police sketches, and the reveal shots from They Live: accidental bureaucratic horror, courtesy of outdated office equipment.
A passport photo isn’t as scary as the photocopies of it: Russian passport photocopies
byu/Fast-Kaleidoscope202 increepy
Previously:
• My life on the road: A lost passport, no ID, and bullshit paperwork trying to get back to Canada
• Boy named after Star Wars character denied passport
• Here are the places you can travel with a US passport
• Researcher creates convincing fake passport using ChatGPT
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