Rose Simmonds was elected to the committee of the Queensland Camera Club (QCC) in 1928 and, in 1936, she served as the club’s vice-president. As the QCC’s sole female member, Simmonds participated in its monthly outings and regularly won its competitions. She was made an associate of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain in 1937 and held a solo exhibition in Brisbane in 1941.

Simmonds’s early photographs reveal her dedication to Pictorialism, a movement that emerged in England and France at the end of the nineteenth century and saw photographers seeking to emulate the effects of painting. To this end, pictorialists eschewed detailed realism in favour of softly focused, atmospheric effects.  

Many of the artist’s photographs bridge the gap between Pictorialism and the clean lines and unusual camera angels of modernist photography, which evolved after World War One. In this work, Simmonds has foregrounded the bridge as a feat of modern engineering but has blurred the detail using the bromoil transfer process often favoured by pictorialists, through which a photograph’s silver image is removed and replaced with ink to create tonal variations.