Who said decisive moment means only taking one shot?
What it means is the moment that most encapsulates the essence of the scene. It may mean multiple attempts at capture. But it does mean developing an intuition on when to press the shutter. Not chimping or machine gunning. Especially relevant in the old days with mechanical rewind and 36 shots per roll, not to mention manual focus and exposure.
This just furthers the ridiculousness of the original quote.
The Decisive Moment is a nice 'line.' But, it is far from accurate. HC-B would spend days, weeks, months in a given situation, 'stalking' a photograph. He had access to people and events through a long stretch of dynamic history, and the images he came back with were not always dynamic nor technically well-executed. [I mean, for example, the guy had access to Marilyn Monroe, but his shot/s of her are beyond pedestrian. Amateurish snaps.] This is excused because of the depth and breadth of a career, but individually... there is a lot of fail.
So, he did not just shoot a single frame, and then print an uncropped masterpiece. His contact sheets show multiple shots. His history shows he spent a lot of time in a given area or on a given subject. A lot of film was shot. The Decisive Moment is more about editing decisions than the actual shooting.
Dismissive cute comments about "chimping" and "machine gunning" are unconstructive and also inaccurate with regard to how great work has been accomplished.
Chimping on a digital display is no different from Polaroid proofing, or Clip Testing, which professionals have been employing since, what, the 60s? That's simply what professionals, who HAD to get a shot, on the spot, to serve a client, had to do. It's easy for dilettantes to dismiss that, thinking they're following HCB's faux dogma... thinking themselves akin to The Great White Hunter.... But, that's not what pros did. If you shot the Superbowl for SI in the 70s, you were using motor drives, and "machine gunning." If you shot Veruschka for Vogue, you were machine gunning with a Hassy and motor or a Nikon F, and you shot a hundred rolls of film in that day. There's no shame in that, because you HAD to get a shot. You've got an Art Director in the room, and a crew of 20, and a budget of a $100k. You get the shot and take as many security measures as possible. Meanwhile, HCB's walking around Provence, without an actual assignment, and leisurely shooting shadows and 'geometry' and that's your model?
In the end, the only thing that matters is The Print. If it took you one frame to get it or 100 rolls, it doesn't matter. Nothing by Avedon or Steven Meisel is diminished because it took 8 hours and a thousand frames — it's the one print that hangs in the gallery or museum.
Kinda sick of the snobbery that accompanies photography. Whether it's a Leica-Canon-Nikon thing, or a rangefinder-SLR thing, or a digital-film thing, or this BS 'one shot' fallacy.... Look at The Print.
