I don’t know, considering I have owned a Leica M3 from 1959, and a few other cameras from that era, a Nikon F, a 1962 original Minolta Hi-Matic and others from that era , and have got awesome shots with those cameras which are all35mm cameras, I fucking rent a Hasselblad 500C/M, introduced in 1957 for paid jobs because with good reversal (slide) film you can get super sharp 120 megapixel shots for a fraction of the cost of renting a 40 or 50 megapixel medium format system like a H4D because the negative is 6 by 6 cm. Okay, going back to the photos, grainy film can be the result of a lot of factors, mainly people not exposing correctly, people over developing or “forcing” film so that you can shoot with less light, or the use of high speed film for low light, those are exterior shots in the sun, so it was probably not “fast” film, or pushed film, it would probably be Kodachrome or Kodacolor X. Kodachrome is a colour reversal film, or slide film, it means you get a positive right after processing and it is meant to be projected via optical means, it can be printed but the process is different, it usually has higher contrast and more saturated colours, and also a really FINE GRAIN, also Kodachrome was invented in 1935.
This is Kodachrome in 1949, It doesn’t say the format, but considering its not blurry with all the moving objects it’s not a large format view camera (which have slow lenses and are not for action shots) It could be a 6 by 6 medium format but it’s not square, it probably is 35mm. I don’t think it’s Kodachrome because of the contrast and the saturation of the colours.
Then Kodacolor X was invented in the 1950′s as a mean to make colour photography available for the general public, before that you could only get colour by using slide film which was much more expensive than B&W so it was used mainly by professional photographers. Kodacolor X is what is known as a Colour print film, it produces a negative, which is only viewable after printing it, and it’s way more cheaper than slides, but still even those “amateur” films can get pretty nice results for example:
1968, it’s square so probably is a Rolleiflex TLR or other 6 by 6 camera. so not really a fair comparison, then maybe this one:
It’s 35mm because of the format, and you can see that the grain is more noticeable but not terrible, it looks like the pictures the OP posted. And Kodacolor X while not as cheap as B&W was pretty used by amateur photographers, and if it was a “special” occasion, I don’t know the last day before summer or something like that it is plausible the photographer used colour print film. Finally to conclude the pictures aren’t that great composition wise, sure they are not terrible, but they are not good, all the subjects are at the center, there is too much air in some subjects are cut, or from their backs, this totally makes sense as a photo club kid taking colour pictures of their friends because it was a special occasion, or just wanted to test the film. Hell I don’t know how many times I have gone to take pictures of empty streets and buildings just to test a camera/film combination, and now that’s the most expensive way of taking pictures.
