The picture shows a sprawling field of dirt and stone, with some scruffy scrub brush in the front and the dark skeleton of an oil derrick rising in the back.

There's a coming-soon sign, too: "Del Amo Center. Regional Shopping Center."

Paul Comon keeps the picture in an album with pages of yellowed paper that crinkle when he turns them. He has thousands of these pictures, glossy black-and-whites that capture the South Bay as it once was.

If a picture really is worth a thousand words, then Comon has spent his life building an encyclopedia of the old South Bay. It describes a place of rolling fields and downtown department stores, where even the Del Amo Fashion Center is nothing more than a vacant lot and a dream.

"History is happening all the time," Comon says, pulling out a picture of a pearly mansion overlooking the shady greens of the Palos Verdes Golf Course. He points to where the asphalt and stucco of Lomita should be, and there's nothing but trees and oil derricks.

"Look at the nothing in the background," he says. "Is that neat or what?"

Comon is 73 years old, and has made a career of photography. He has owned Paul's Photo in Torrance for years, and he still has a darkroom in his basement, right next to the washer and dryer.

He picked up photography as a soldier in Korea. He remembers the life-changing words of a friend: "Gee, you shouldn't go overseas without a good camera." So, he bought a little Kodak Retina with a metal cover and stuffed it into the front pocket of his fatigues jacket.

He went to work after the war at a small Torrance camera store. And he found himself studying the pictures on the wall, old prints of a parade that had marched through downtown Torrance years before.

They were windows into an en-tire world that was fast disappearing. They showed an old-fashioned downtown of storefronts and awnings. The names on the buildings advertised the Torrance Men's Shop, the Sam Levy Department Store, the Squire Style Shoppe.

In time, Comon became the manager of the camera store, and then the owner. Whenever he spotted a historic photo, he asked the owner if he could make a copy. Pretty soon, customers were coming to him, offering their old snapshots.

Comon and his wife used to set out on long bike rides, each with a child on the handlebars and a child on the back, taking pictures as they went. Sometimes, he would pull over at an intersection just to take a quick picture of the four corners.

Sometimes, he would think to himself that a building or a block was sure to change, and he'd take a picture of that, too, just to preserve it.

He keeps them now in a printer box inscribed with black pen: "Historical pictures and data, Torrance and vicinity." He pasted some of his pictures into an album like a stamp collection. He keeps others in old picture envelopes, the ones that say "Here Are Your Treasured Memories" on the flap.

Most of his pictures show nothing more than a scene. A quiet street of tidy bungalows. A shopping district lined with chrome fenders and tail fins. A dusty stretch of blacktop that could be a desert trail but is really Hawthorne Boulevard.

He has a whole series of pictures of old Walteria Lake, and one makes it look like a river rolling between trees and electric poles. The lake was really just a low spot that flooded year after year; now it's covered over with houses and shops and Anza Avenue.

A few of the pictures portray specific events instead of scenery, but not many. One shows a crowd craning for a look at the black wreckage of a small plane. The fire engine on the scene has a single domed light on the roof that looks more like a baseball cap.

Another shows a girl posing next to her snowman on the day it snowed in Torrance -- back in '48, Comon thinks. It's a Southern California snowman, no mittens on its stick hands and no scarf, but sunglasses pressed on to its face.

"I was more interested in the way the elevation changed, the way the city evolved, the way things looked," Comon says now. "I wanted to photograph everything, to preserve how it looks right now."

Comon doesn't take out his photos very often, only when visitors ask for a look back. The Torrance Historical Society has talked to him about making a calendar out of some of his best, but nothing has come of that yet.

As much as his collection shows how things were, it shows just as much how they've changed. He has pictures of buildings that have long since turned to dust, and pictures of dust where sprawling office buildings and malls stand now.

And down near the bottom of his printer's box, there's a glossy brochure he picked up somewhere along the way. It shows a single house on a hill, looking down at white lines of surf washing toward an empty beach.

"Liquidation sale," it says in big letters. "Choice ocean view lots in beautiful Hollywood Riviera.

"As low as $990."