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An Indigo Telephoto: Ladies of the Roof
16 July 2025
We were walking up Montgomery St. the other day when, coming to California St. and its cable cars, we looked up trying to find another San Francisco landmark. That would be the Ladies of the Roof on Philip Johnson's 23-story office tower at 580 California St.
Ladies of the Roof. iPhone 15 Po Max back camera at 15.7mm, f2.8, 1/1368 second and ISO 32. Captured with the Adobe Indigo camera app at 10x. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
You see three of the 12 ladies here. There are three on each side.
Johnson commissioned Muriel Castanis to make them. According to J.W. Oker in Grim Roofers:
She designed them by covering models in epoxy-soaked cloths. The models then wriggled out as the clothes hardened, and Castanis used those forms as a basis for the 12-foot-tall skyscraper specters San Francisco has today.
The building's site explains their significance:
One of the most popular misconceptions about the 'Ladies of the Roof' is that they were designed as specific representations of deities or historical figures. Truth be known, though Castanis was obviously inspired by such classical representations, she did not have any dramatic symbolism or otherworldly spectres in mind when she created them, other than what she has called her interpretation of the "corporate goddesses." Rumor has it that Johnson himself intended the faceless statues to be something of a jab at the very 12 board members who posed such an obstacle to the realization of his vision.
We'e always been quite fond of them. San Francisco has some unusual takes on architectural figural sculpture.
Bernard Maybeck's caryatids at the Palace of Fine Arts aren't holding up anything but are looking over the top, weeping. Ulric Ellerhusen designed them for Maybeck.
Jessica Plazik suggests, "The melancholy figures with their backs turned were supposed to enhance the idea of sadness and ruin."
Beauty tempered by sadness, Maybeck once said of the Palace.
Johnson's faceless figures may not echo that sentiment but they do speak silently of the corporate soul. They are ghoulishly posed, threatening the pedestrians below more than threatening to jump.
But they are also clownish. The threat to pedestrians is the traffic, not the statuary.
It was a very gray day when we stood under them, a pedestrian ourselves, looking up at the imposing figures. We thought we'd use Adobe's Indigo camera app to take their photo. Indigo offers a 10x zoom on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which is twice the reach as Apple's Camera app.
Our early tests of the 10x zoom showed it to be a lot better than Apple's 5x captures, which are often pixelated in an attempt to avoid camera blur, apparently.
How does Adobe do it? With computational photography. Adobe has explained what's actually going on at 10x zoom:
In Indigo, if you pinch-zoom enough (2× or more if using the main lens; 10× or more if using the telephoto lens on an iPhone 16 Pro Max), we employ multi-frame super-resolution, which restores much of the image quality lost by digital scaling. Unlike AI-based super-resolution software packages, Indigo uses the camera to silently capture multiple images of the scene, more images than we need to reduce noise, counting on your natural handshake to provide slightly different viewpoints for each image. (Don't intentionally shake the phone, though, because that would cause motion blur!) We then combine these images to produce a single photo with more detail than is present in a single image. And because we've captured different viewpoints, the extra detail in our super-resolution photos is real, not hallucinated.
So, as you can see above, we were able to get a lot closer to these figures that we might otherwise have gotten with our iPhone. And that was close enough.