The photos are almost the same!

The author of my panel presentation article, Sharon A. Jessee, wrote in her article "Laughter and Identity in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo" that Reed often uses the pictures in the novel for contradiction and irony, which draws attention to a point he's trying to make (I didn't pay much attention to the pictures in Mumbo Jumbo after I learned that they mostly don't make sense):

In the epilogue on page 210, Papa LaBas is talking about Freud and says:

"I once leafed through a photo book about the West. I was struck by how the Whites figured in the center of the photos and drawings while Blacks were centrifugally distant. The center was usually violent: gunfighting lynching murdering torturing. The Blacks were, usually, if it were an interior, standing in the doorway. Digging the center." (p. 210).

With Jessee's article in mind, I noticed that the photos sort of contradicted these observations by LaBas. The page is set up with two photos stacked on top of eachother, like this:

The quote from the same page says that whites are mostly in the center of the photos while blacks are pushed into the centrifugally into the distance. In terms of the 3D space of the pictures, the blacks are distant, in the background, away from the action happening in the foreground. However, in a 2D sense of the picture, the two black men in the two photos are both in the very center, and in almost the exact same position in both photos; leaning to the left, head slightly tilted.

This also goes with the general theme of the book, where the high and low speech styles are switched between black and white characters; in the photos, the racial stereotypes that are portrayed are the exact opposite stereotypes. Blacks are stereotyped as rough while whites are stereotyped as high-class, but these photos reverse that notion. And what Jessee's article says is that this draws attention to those stereotypes.