I haven't read Brinnin's report but capturing hundreds of single shots a day is not the same as the "shotgun approach" of just pressing the shutter a couple of seconds with a motor drive and fill a film with one scene hoping that you got the decisive moment covered.
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To be fair to Brinnin, he didn't use the phrase 'shotgun approach' (the choice of phrase, perhaps unfortunate, was mine). Here's a related section from another book "...He shot hundreds of pictures every day, Brinnin observed, despite his oft repeted claim that 'taking pictures constantly was the sign of an amateur'..." (p.45, R.Miller,
Magnum - Fifty Years at the Front Line of History.) The phrasing here is more careful and it does point to a tension between belief and practice.
...I can easily see, if you don't get what HCB was up to, his intentions, then frictions on a long journey were unavoidable.
Incidentally, some of the photos Cartier-Bresson took in this trip were exhibited in "Cartier Bresson: A Question of Colour" (
http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/about/press/press-releases/cartier-bresson-a-question-of-colour). There is a transitional feel to them, as he seems to be midway between the surrealist phase and the decidedly photojournalistic turn he took in the aftermath of the second world war. Perhaps that explains the abundance of photos reported by Brinnin. Cartier-Bresson was slowly putting aside the surrealist manifesto and the stringencies imposed by it, switching gear to a mode which was more in keeping with the times and his interests.
This, perhaps Brinnin did not understand. Or, if he did, he was purposefully oblivious of it in his memoir.
