Gary, the Newton image you posted of the two lovers in masks seems to me very Bataillean. Here is a passage written by Bataille’s friend and colleague, Michel Leiris:

“With full consciousness, love is reduced to a natural and bestial process – since the brain is symbolically suppressed by the mask – the fatality that forces us down is finally subdued. Thanks to the mask, in our hands this woman is in the end only nature itself, shaped by blind laws, without soul or personhood, a nature that this one time, at any rate, is completely chained to us… The gaze, the quintessence of human expression, is blocked out for a time – which lends the woman a still more hellish and subterranean significance. And the mouth, which can only be discerned thanks to a small split, is reduced to the animal-like role of a wound. The usual ordering of the decorative elements, finally, is stood entirely on its head; the body is naked and the head masked. These are all elements that make tools out of leather pieces … which correspond wonderfully to what eroticism actually is: a means of getting out of oneself, of tearing away the bonds which morality, reason and custom impose on us; simultaneously, a way of banishing the evil forces, of defying God and the terrestrial bounds of hell representing him, by taking over their property, the whole universe, in one of its particularly significant parts … and subjecting it to our control.”

As you can see, while Leiris is not talking about Newton’s photograph, he might as well be. Newton’s mask finishes just above the mouth, into which the somewhat disguised male is extending hid tongue. The woman is on top – she is a predator, again reversing the usual roles. The clothing they are wearing, which is minimal, makes a fetish out of the scene, but this is not a fetish fostered as a part of our usual governmental pastoral care program. It strikes at the very heart of our social organisation. It is an example of what Foucault calls ‘transgression’. Perhaps part of the power, the shock-value, of Newton’s art stems from this.