Gare D'Orsay, Paris, August 1983

All boarded up and in disrepair. It was accessed by prying open a slot in the fencing surrounding the building.

Two years earlier the empty station had been used to film a key scene in Jean-Jacques Beineix's film Diva. It had previously served as a set for Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial.

Built for the World's Fair of 1900, the same year a little-known 18-year-old painter arrived in Paris from Barcelona. In fact it was in the bustling new train station that Pablo Picasso disembarked on October 1st. Earlier that summer the city's first Metro line had gone into service, behind schedule and over budget.

At its peak the station received over 200 trains a day, but its short platforms and the increasing electrification of trains doomed it to obsolescence by the 1930s.