Photos are completely unnecessary and mostly nuisance IMO.
Not saying I necessarily believe that happens, but I really appreciate the logic of your point/question.
Thinking that it might as well go the other way seems to imply that there's just something weird about names, and that people don't really have racial biases. But this charitable view of the world has been shown false time and again.
In any case, a version of the study with live people, instead of photos, has also been done, and, not surprisingly, shown the same result:
> Other studies have also examined race and employment. In a 2009 study, Devah Pager, Bruce Western and Bart Bonikowski, all now sociologists at Harvard, sent actual people to apply for low-wage jobs. They were given identical résumés and similar interview training. Their sobering finding was that African-American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs at a rate as low as white applicants who had criminal records.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-stic...
There have been several variations of a famous study where they sent identical resumes to hundreds of companies, with the single change that there was a stereotypical "white" name vs "Black" name at the top.
The studies consistently find that the "white" names get far more call backs.
Granted, those studies were in the US, but I'd be very surprised if a similar effect did not show up in most European countries.