Bruce Davidson began photography at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University and was later drafted into the army and stationed near Paris where he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the four founders of the renowned international cooperative photo agency, Magnum Photos. After military service, in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum Photos. From 1958 to 1961 he created such seminal bodies of work as The Dwarf, Brooklyn Gang, and the Freedom Rides. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to photograph what became a profound documentation of the Civil Rights Movement in America. In 1963 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his work in a solo show. In 1966 he was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, and spent two years bearing witness to the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem. This work was published by Harvard University Press in 1970 under the title East 100th Street and was later republished and expanded by St. Ann’s Press. The work became an exhibition that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1980 he captured the vitality of the New York Metro’s underworld that was later published in his book Subway and exhibited at the International Center for Photography in 1982. In 1995 he photographed the landscape and layers of life of Central Park. Davidson continues to create classic bodies of work from his 50-year career that have been extensively published in monographs and are included in all the major public and private fine art collections around the world.

Journey of Consciousness is a gorgeous three-volume box set of 800 photographs drawn from this master photographer's immense archive. Chosen by Davidson himself, the selection spans a 60-year career, and features such seminal bodies of work as Circus(1958), Brooklyn Gang(1959), East 100th Street(1966-1968), The Civil Rights Movement(1961-1965), Subway(1980) and Central Park(1992-1995), as well as his two most recent works in progress--a series of urban landscapes made in Paris (2007) and Los Angeles (2009)--and many unpublished photographs. The pages in these volumes document Davidson's passionate and progressive vision, a vision that bears witness to several decades of volatile change in twentieth-century America.

Born in 1933 in Oak Park, Illinois, Bruce Davidson's prolific career began in 1949, when he began taking photographs as a precocious 16-year-old. In 1954, he studied at Yale University with the great teacher and artist, Josef Albers, working briefly as a freelance photographer for Lifemagazine before joining Magnum Photos in 1958, after a meeting with one of its founders, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Davidson was given a Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007. His work has been extensively published in monographs and is included in many major collections around the world.