Could it simply be the prints? When my dad briefly played with 35mm photography while working in 1950s Switzerland, what you got by default when you had your f

Could it simply be the prints? When my dad briefly played with 35mm photography while working in 1950s Switzerland, what you got by default when you had your film developed was contact strips. I guess enlargements were made by hand, and thus expensive, so the contact strips were it, for those photos (and of course my mom threw out the negatives about 40 years later, right before my siblings and I got into b&w photography with darkroom equipment and all). I can totally see the local photofinisher just making contact prints of those medium format pictures, and those going into the album, and... well, we've always done it this way, why change?