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two most recent works in progress--a series of urban landscapes made in Paris (2007) and Los Angeles (2009)--and many unpublished photographs.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.