In this historical work, created by Collins in 2006, there are two — or perhaps more — concurrent stories.

The first is of those common men and women who somehow rose to become heroes, riding into the blaze of the 1906 San Francisco Fire to save others. The reds are a moving, continuous form of the very fire into which they rode.

The second is a question: what makes a singular person take actions that change lives, alter the course of history, and pave the very ground we walk on?

As just one example, this work is in part an homage to Eadweard Muybridge.

Muybridge failed at nearly every endeavor he attempted until he took up photography, embracing it with passion and, in the process, becoming one of the most famous photographers of the 1800s. He was the first to line up cameras — as many as 20 in a straight line — to capture movement. He was also the first to prove that during a gallop, a horse has all four hooves off the ground, winning a bet for Leland Stanford, who underwrote much of his work.

That lineup of cameras was then printed onto cells and spun around a lamp, creating what was, in essence, one of the earliest forms of motion pictures. His technique was echoed nearly a century later in The Matrix. It is a reconfiguration of his images that Collins uses within this work.

So how great an impact did a common man who became a photographer have on the millions of lives that followed his own?

We all have the heroic inside us. It is encoded in our very DNA. Time is, perhaps, a matter of what we ourselves choose to accomplish.