STATESVILLE - If computers will take us into the future, Mike Lassiter's camera takes us into the past. With a thousand clicks of a shutter over six years, the Statesville lawyer became a time traveler, rolling along North Carolina's rural highways and into its downtowns, capturing images of an era before Internet shopping, before big-box stores, before shopping malls, chain restaurants and strip centers.

In Mike Lassiter's North Carolina -- the one now visible in more than 550 photographs in a book he has published -- business is conducted in red-brick buildings with gritty oak floors, and the man who takes your money is the one whose name is above the door.

"Our Vanishing Americana: A North Carolina Portrait" is a pictorial guide to the state's commercial relics of the 19th and 20th century: the general stores and hardware shops, the corner drug stores with soda fountains, the blue-plate diners and hot dog stands, the filling stations, the barber shops, the single-screen theaters.

By the time Lassiter, 44, began pointing his camera at them, many had already succumbed to modern accounting realities. But others hang on, their second- and third-generation owners content with making what used to be called a decent living.

"I went on a mission," Lassiter says. It started with the simple nostalgic act of taking a few snapshots around Chapel Hill. When he graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1985, he got a Minolta 35mm as a gift, and he used it to photograph a few of his favorite hangouts: Hector's, home of the Greek Grilled Cheese; Sutton's Drugs; Colonial Drugs; and Jeff's Confectionary.

Lassiter stored the pictures away, spent a few years trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, enrolled in law school at Campbell University and, eventually, returned to Statesville to practice with his dad.

There, things were changing. Bulldozers were reshaping the downtown of his youth. Fowler's Grocery? Holmes Drug Store? The Playhouse Theater? Closed. Closed. Closed and torn down, red velvet curtains and all.

In 1999, Lassiter decided to photograph what was left. And not just in his town.

"I decided to try to get at least one picture from every county in the state," he says. One hundred counties. One hundred pictures. How hard could that be?

Easy enough at the start. Between clients, when he didn't have to be in court or on the phone, he'd slip out the door, slide behind the wheel of his car and ease out of downtown.

He'd be down the road before his dad would look around and ask, "Where's Mike?"

"Out taking pich-ers," a secretary would say.

Into his own past

On a rainy Friday in January, with no cases on the docket, Lassiter pulls the office door closed behind him and heads for the Lexus in the parking lot across the street. For the most part, he's through shooting pictures -- the book came out Dec. 1 and is on people's coffee tables now -- but he's happy to conduct a tour of some of his favorite local architectural artifacts.

He starts by circling the block and pointing out what isn't there anymore.

"The theater stood right there, about where that sign is now," he says of the Playhouse, where he spent many hours as a boy. Down on the corner, where he used to drink cherry Cokes at the drugstore soda fountain, there's a quaint new boutique. A block away, all that's left of Lazenby-Montgomery Hardware is a historical marker on a wall.

At Riddle Schwinn Cyclery just outside of downtown, Lassiter gets out and peers through the dark glass, looking for Wilson Riddle, who took the shop over from his father years ago. The door is locked.

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