Every day the Guardian gives its centre pages over entirely to some photograph or photographs - more often than not, it's not a newsworthy picture, it's just something to get us thinking or open our eyes to the world around us.

Friday they gave the pages over to a photographic series by "US conceptual artist Bill Sullivan", part of a body of work called 3Situations. It's all explained one way or another on his website 3Situations.com.

Anyway, what he did was take a whole lot of pictures of commuters pushing through a turnstile on the New York subway, and the "photographic series More Turns presents 48 of them, and that's what the Guardian gave us.

I don't know if he used all the pictures, or picked out ones that seemed to make a point. I rather hope he did, because looking at them together is really a pretty frightening sight. I don't mean they are ugly people or frightening people - but pretty well all of them look so unhappy and tense and worried.

I'm not suggesting this is just 2007, or New York. In fact I was reminded of TS Eliot's lines in The Waste Land, published in 1922:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

See what you think - here is a link to the full 48 shots - click on each row and you get the pictures blown up so you can see them properly (for example, the top row).

Whatever the date, whatever the city, I don't think human beings are meant to live like this.