Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Bruce Davidson won first prize in the Kodak National High School Competition at the age of sixteen. He went on to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University.

During military service in Paris, Davidson met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of Magnum Photos. In 1957 he worked as a freelance photographer for Life, and in 1959 he became a member of Magnum.

Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to document the Civil Rights Movement across the United States. In 1963 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his work in a one-man show that included powerful and historic images.

The first photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts was awarded to Davidson in 1966, and he spent the next two years photographing one block in New York City: the resulting book, East 100th Street, presents his images of the inhabitants of a rundown tenement block in Spanish Harlem.

Davidson extended his view of the city with Subway, which explored the underground New York metro and its subterranean travelers, and Central Park, a four-year encounter with the city's magnificent green space, a convergence of humanity, nature and the city. Davidson's film Living Off the Land received the Critics Award from the American Film Festival.

Henry Geldzahler, the former Curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, said, "The ability to enter so sympathetically into what seems superficially an alien environment remains Bruce Davidson's sustained triumph; in his investigation he becomes the friendly recorder of tenderness and tragedy."

Davidson continues to live and work in New York City.