What art lovers didn’t know back in 2014 was that Drucker and Ernst had been growing apart romantically for some time; they decided to break up shortly after they returned to the West Coast to film the Transparent pilot after the biennial. This trajectory is subtly tracked in Relationship: the book begins with playful images of the couple exploring their intimacy along with their transitions, and ends with the two in largely separate frames, either in the dark or behind screens.

Rhys and Drucker’s romantic separation affects both their and our understanding of Relationship now, after two years have passed. The book is constructed to simultaneously evoke both the excitement of transgender people beginning transition and the nostalgia for the rare romantic relationship between two trans people of different genders — a relationship that proved ultimately fleeting when they separated after six years. As a result, Relationship is a book that is at once gorgeous and affirming, but also tinged with melancholy. It’s precisely the tension that makes this version of the series even more powerful and true than when it was first exhibited.

“It's been a little bit odd for me to be totally transparent,” Ernst said about publishing the book, as he settled onto a blue couch with Drucker. He’s the more private of the pair and had just taken a red-eye flight from L.A., where he and Drucker are based. He discussed how unnerving it has been to see what he had first conceived as private photographs in print — ones that Drucker and Ernst were only taking for themselves until Whitney Biennial curator Stuart Comer saw them during a studio visit. “It's kind of like publishing a photo book of one's most awkward phase, or transitional phase. An adolescence.”

The two certainly seemed more settled in their genders as they sat together, Ernst sporting a goatee in T-shirt and jeans, Drucker in a casual tie-dye dress, her large blue eyes framed by bangs. There was between them that familiar push and pull: the attraction that brought them together, and the circumstances that drove them apart. They sat too close to be strangers, yet with a thin invisible barrier that kept them from touching. Most other ex-couples are thrown together like this only on occasion — but both Drucker and Ernst, as artistic collaborators, continue to see each other almost every day. And certainly, broken-up couples don’t typically publish books of relationship photographs that depict both the second puberty of gender transition and the first blush of a new kind of romantic relationship.