Welcome to The City: Evan Thompson and Izzy Balderas Headline New Photography Movement in The Bay

Evan Thompson and Izzy Balderas star in Episode 2 of "Welcome to The City: Bay Area Stories."

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

If there’s one thing all artists and entertainers have in common, it’s drive. That hunger resonates throughout the veins of The Bay, that insatiable thirst, that feeling of never being good enough. Being “Bay” means you have your own way of doing things, your own dialect, your own culture, and that unique outlook on life pushes so many of The Bay’s creative people to go above and beyond.

Stephen Curry is a perfect example of that. He’s now the NBA’s most popular player on arguably the best basketball team in the world but once upon a time he was an undersized teenager who couldn’t even get a scholarship offer from his dad’s alma mater.

“Seeing someone out of San Francisco do well and win and achieve something,” Bay Area photographer Evan Thompson says, “it’s huge for us.”

Thompson and Izzy Balderas know all about that drive. As competing San Francisco photographers, they compete. If Thompson posts a great Instagram shot in the morning, best believe Balderas is looking to top it during the afternoon. It doesn’t matter that Balderas is from a city neighborhood called the Tenderloin that’s very grungy and gutter. It doesn’t matter that Thompson is an outsider, originally hailing from San Diego. They bonded because they both understand the hustle. All of that comes together in area Flask Mobs, a movement where Bay Area creatives gather once a month to takeover the streets of San Francisco with flasks and cameras in hand to capture unique shots of The Bay.

“I want to make a name for myself,” says Balderas. “But not only that, I want to make a name for the city that I’m currently living in, the places where I learned a lot from the city.”

In Episode 2 of the #ChargedByBelief series from Under Armour and Mass Appeal, we get an inside look into the concepts and attitudes that spawned the Flask Mob movement. Just as Curry is constantly aiming to make his teammates better in the NBA, so too are photographers like Balderas and Thompson. For them, getting shots of The Bay is fun enough, but it goes to another level when you’re pushing one another for something even better.

Latest in Style