Twin Palms published You and I in September 2011 as a 196-page hardcover. The volume gathers ninety four-color plates that Ryan McGinley selected from his first decade of work, with essays by Sylvia Wolf and Vince Aletti. His large-scale color photographs center on his friends, a group that forms part of New York’s Lower East Side youth culture. The publisher describes his subjects as willing collaborators, drawn from skateboard, music, and graffiti subcultures, who perform for the camera with a frank self-awareness that is distinctly contemporary.

The book presents both the urban youth-culture images for which McGinley is best known and newer work made in natural settings outside New York City, where he creates specific situations for his subjects to lose themselves in the moment. The publisher frames nature as a site of freedom and describes the work as capturing a sense of buoyancy and release. The range of settings gives readers a way to consider how a change of surroundings may alter the encounter between photographer and subject.

In format the book is a clothbound hardcover in a pictorial dust jacket, roughly 9 by 12 inches, with parallel English and French texts. The selection was made by the photographer himself, while Wolf and Aletti provide essay contributions. The plates and essays together present a decade of photographs rather than a single series.

The collection invites a comparison between the social spaces of the city and the possibilities of an outdoor encounter. Across these settings, a reader can consider the subjects’ participation in making an image and the photographer’s role in creating its circumstances. The selection brings ten years of photographs into one volume, offering room to notice recurring concerns alongside differences between individual images.