Twin Palms Publishers issued Herb Ritts’s Men / Women in September 1989 as a boxed set of two hardcover volumes totaling 96 pages, containing 47 duotone plates that Ritts selected from the first decade of his photographic work. The book was published in a format of roughly 8 by 10 inches and bears the ISBN 9780944092118.

The publisher states that the pictures were taken for the photographer’s own pleasure, and that many were rejected for publication in popular magazines which judged them either too eccentric or erotic for their readers. The photographs, in the publisher’s account, do not compromise the artist’s individual vision for the sake of popular acceptance. The selection raises a question about the distance between an image made for personal satisfaction and one considered suitable for a magazine audience.

According to the publisher, the men and women in these pages were familiar for their work in commercial modeling, but Ritts’s camera shows them in a new and familiar light. The subjects include photography of the nude, of women, and of men. The two-volume format makes comparison possible: a reader can move between the books and consider how the grouping of images changes the experience of individual photographs.

Ritts’s own selection is an important part of the set’s authorship. It gathers images from a defined period through the photographer’s choices, while the duotone reproductions give them a shared printed form. The boxed pair asks to be handled as an object, opened in two parts, and read as an argument about looking.