Danny Gamboa’s Ghost Bike installation for Susan Curtis, who was killed in Long Beach on January 15. Photo courtesy of ZKO Films.
2011 marked an extraordinarily hard year for Long Beacher Danny Gamboa: cyclists seemed to be getting killed far too often. In that year alone, Southern California saw a staggering 70% increase in deaths from 2010, with 70 cyclists losing their lives in the seven-county region of SoCal alone in 2011.
And in a rather morbid way, Gamboa saw this as the moment to meld his desire to begin making documentaries with his love for cycling—in this case, following the Southern Californian men and women who place memorial Ghost Bikes at the locations where a cyclist had lost his or her life.