The vulnerable side of corporate working life is captured by Mark Curran in his Hewlett-Packard photographs, writes Susan McKay

Mark Curran works in both Dublin and Berlin, and is preoccupied with globalisation, so meeting in an Italian coffee bar in Dublin airport, while he is en route for Germany, via London, seems like a good idea.

But it leads to a series of fraught texts: "Sorry, bus late, c u in 1 hour." "Roadworks city centre." "Sorry again, heavy traffic port tunnel, not moving at all." "Really sorry about this. C u in 15."

He arrives into Departures somewhat frazzled. Many languages are being spoken in the chaotic cafe. It takes ages to get a coffee and the table he sets the sleek grey book about his latest exhibition down on, hasn't been wiped.

The book, like the exhibition it accompanies, offers a guide to another sort of place in new Ireland. The Breathing Factory is about the Hewlett-Packard Technology Campus at Leixlip, Co Kildare. It is a place of lowrise, geometric buildings, all straight lines, shiny steel surfaces and spotless floors. Under neon lights, workers wear white overalls, gloves and hairnets and move silently through austere work spaces, swiping security cards to proceed through electronically operated doors, monitored at all times. This is the US multinational Hewlett-Packard's inkjet manufacturing base in Europe.

Outside, new trees have been carefully staked into the earth, leaning out toward the fence that encloses the vast, two million square feet, complex.

In one of the essays accompanying the book, Sean O'Riain comments that Curran's photographs "give us a visual insight into what are surprisingly obscure workplaces - the modern manufacturing plants that circle Dublin city, the icons within the new cathedrals of high-tech industrial parks".

It is called "Hewlett Packard Ireland", but, says Curran, "this is the architecture of anywhere. This is globalised space in the green fields of Kildare. These are buildings of the same design as others in Singapore and Puerto Rico."

In a gesture to the local, there are rooms called after Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan and James Joyce. The "fleeting nature" of these enterprises has inevitable consequences for the workers. "Their vulnerability is very apparent," he says.

This vulnerability is highlighted in Curran's photographic portraits of the workers. Some are taken in the gowning room. The workers face the camera in their white, clean-room uniforms, while in the background, more of the uniforms hang on rails, waiting for other workers to inhabit them.

One photograph simply shows a steel rail of the spotless garments. Work in such an environment offers a very temporary identity.

In the exhibition, showing at Belfast Exposed, the portraits are hung from wires, held by clips, rather than given the permanence of frames. O'Riain comments that in the high-tech workplace, the traditional industrial relationship between worker and machine is reversed. Machines with pistons and presses threaten fragile bodies: "In HP [ Hewlett-Packard], the body threatens technology."

CURRAN SPEAKS ABOUT the "post-modern critique of photographic practices" and says he wanted to "broaden out from the traditional photo-documentary tradition".

He doesn't show his workers working. "They present themselves to the camera. I had their complicity and trust - the idea is of co-authorship," he says.

The faces of his subjects are, indeed, strongly expressive of personality, and there are portraits of workers whose jobs don't require them to submit to the anonymity of uniforms. Some of these desk-workers give glimpses of the other parts of their lives - a family photo beside their computer, a Chelsea screensaver.

This is a multi-ethnic workforce. Rui, who moved to Ireland from Portugal 20 years ago, talks about the importance in the global economy of "educating our young generation" and says, "I feel myself an Irishman."

HP employs 2,500 workers, but as "Lionel" (full names are not given) the vice-president and general manager, states with rather chilling frankness, "It all depends on who puts the next grant on the table . . . No multinational has any emotional attachment to Ireland, or Singapore, or China or India. It is business, right? And if there is no business reason to be in Ireland, we will leave tomorrow." Low corporation tax, a "co-operative" government, and the ability to dispense with trade unions all made Ireland attractive. But China, he says, is "looking good".

Mark, a clean room supervisor, complains that Ireland is an increasingly expensive place to live, and wages at HP aren't keeping pace, despite its high profitability.

"There's a level of dissatisfaction from the ground level but corporate kind of run things differently."

Workers are well aware, he says, that the company can "pack up and piss off to India".

He speaks of some of the operators feeling they are in "a dead-end job and going nowhere".

Among the staff interviewees, Mark is unusually outspoken. Curran was accompanied on the premises at all times by a member of management, and all the material he collected was vetted.

The exhibition includes a photograph most of which is obscured by a yellow post-it on which is written: "Hi Oonagh, I don't want Mark to use this picture. The rest are fine."

Curran spent nine months negotiating access to the complex, and was initially worried that the company's insistence on policing his every move might hinder him.

"In the end, it became part of the evocation of the place, and a comment on the way global capital is highly managed and protected."

He intended to study commerce at UCD, but then in 1984, during the years of high unemployment, his family emigrated to Canada.

"We were among 125,000 people who left the Republic that year. I had romantic notions of Ireland and bored people in Canada late into the night about how wonderful it was. When I came back in 1992, a friend brought me to the Square in Tallaght. It was a culture shock. There was this Cineplex and all these places, identical to what I'd left behind in Canada."

He lived in Smithfield. "It was being transformed, as I was. I came to see building sites as the birthing grounds of the new Ireland."

CURRAN HAD TRAINED and worked as a social worker in Canada, and was employed as one on his return to Ireland. Another culture shock.

"It was like going back 20 years in terms of social provision. I had to leave." He went on a journey to south-east Asia in 1996, and brought a camera. On his return he worked in the Winding Stair bookshop where he did portraits of regular customers.

Then he embarked on what would become the award-winning Southern Cross project, "a documentary portrait of contemporary Ireland" based on photographs of the new landscape of motorways and by-passes, with portraits of construction workers, and of the Irish Financial Services Centre with portraits of office workers.

With the "Breathing Factory" he wanted get away from "just photography". It includes the interviews as well as video installations and extracts from his "field diary".

He describes the new work as "an evocation of the space coming from an ethnographic background".

It has already been shown in Venice, Montreal, and at the Butler Galley, Kilkenny. It will be at Dublin's Gallery of Photography in October, and then it goes to Cologne.

Curran lectures in photography at the Dublin Institute of Technology, but lives in Berlin.

"I'm looking at the transformation of East Germany," he says. Berlin is New York in Europe - full of migrants, very working class, very special. It is a wonderful enigmatic city with a sense of displacement I can relate to."

The Breathing Factory exhibition is at Belfast Exposed until May 19. The book wih the same title is published by Edition Braus and Belfast Exposed Photography