'They're known as men's rooms, production rooms or sample rooms,' says photographer Andrew Buurman. 'But when I spoke to nurses and the consultant who first got me into this, I said, "You don't really call them that, do you?" They answered, "No, of course not. We all call them the wank rooms"- which you would. That's one thing that fascinated me. Nobody puts a name on them except the staff, who call them what they are.'

In dozens of such rooms at clinics around the country, Buurman - authentically solitary, camera in hand - captured the clinical coldness, banality and matter-of-fact functionality of these spaces where medical orgasms take place, often in an emotionally charged situation of hope, fear, clammy embarrassment, optimism, pessimism or crushing disappointment. These are the little rooms where men deliver their sperm, either to check if any are viable, or to load the test tube (or, more accurately, the Petri dish) that may or may not result in an IVF conception.

It was the former task that brought Buurman into this surreal orbit. 'We hadn't conceived in a couple of years,' he says, 'so we went to a private clinic to find out what was wrong.' Nothing was, and he and his partner now have a 13-month-old daughter born naturally. 'Sitting in that room,' Buurman relates, 'I thought, "This is a strange thing to do", so I rang the consultant afterwards, saying: "It's an odd request, but I want to photograph your men's room." The consultant we'd seen liked the idea. That's how this project started.'

Buurman's fascination is firstly artistic. 'It's the essence of photography,' he says, 'to document things that people can't usually see. For blokes, it would be the inside of a women's loo. We're aware these rooms exist, but it's not something we like to talk about. They're taboo because it's masturbation. We can talk about sex these days, but we can't talk about having a wank. The fascination for the viewer is, "Oh, that's what they look like". I'm interested in taboo subjects.'

Secondly, infertility and IVF are a growing social phenomenon, something that needs documenting. 'We all know people of our generation, the "Oops, forgot to have kids" generation, who are going through this business,' says Buurman, who is 41. 'It's a social issue that's happening more and more. Obviously, it's fantastic that people can have kids later in life, and people can have them who wouldn't have been able to before, but for every upside there is a downside: this clinical, sterile thing. Beckham called his son Brooklyn because he was conceived there, but you wouldn't call a child Second Corridor Along on the Right, on the Third Floor.'

The rooms Buurman photographed represent both NHS hospitals and private clinics. 'Some NHS ones are excellent,' he says, 'like the one with the bed.' The image he shows me looks like a spare room in a comfortable house: a single bed with a pine frame, covered in a neat white duvet; a chest of drawers; a swathe of smoke-blue curtain covering a window; a framed poster on the wall. This is some NHS administrator's idea of masturbation heaven, while other rooms are equipped with a rattan cane chair (for the upright citizen), a black PVC sofa (next to a bedside table groaning with porn), handy boxes of tissues, Johnson's baby oil (or perhaps it is handwash) and a dentistry-style couch draped in blue paper.

'I'm also interested in the art people put in the rooms,' Buurman says. 'There's a pastoral forest theme, a Dutch still-life and a coral reef - which looks like it's in quite a posh private clinic.' Another bizarre aspect is the soulless bureaucracy. In one room, Buurman has photographed the labels used to identify samples. 'On the label, it says date, time produced, date of last ejaculation,' says Buurman, 'which is very important. You have to leave it 48 hours, but it mustn't be older than a week. At this clinic, men have to fill those in and stick them on the bottle.'

The funniest example of bureaucracy, he says, is a notice in one of the rooms, headed 'Some feedback for you'. It attempts to explain why the key to the room has such an enormous fob. 'Most comments from men in our ongoing Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire refer to the oversized tag on the key to this room,' the text solemnly reads. The reason, it says, is that men were accidentally going home with the key in their pocket - and, as in a hotel, a conspicuous tag 'reduces key loss significantly'. What the administrators appear to have overlooked is the psychological effect on men carrying the tag in corridors and public areas. 'As you walk to the room, everyone knows exactly where you are going,' says Buurman.

Inevitably, some men find the psychological burden too much and can't relax in such a clinical setting. 'Then you have to go in surgically,' Buurman explains, 'and remove the semen from the testes - which costs the client another £1,500 for the privilege.' Some men get around the non-delivery problem by having their wives in the room with them. 'The majority of African men tend to do that,' Buurman reveals, 'because masturbation is a taboo in sub-Saharan Africa like, why have a dog and bark yourself?' Surprisingly, most clinics in Britain allow women to assist. 'That's one of the things I found out later,' Buurman says. 'Because, of course, nobody ever asks.'

Embarrassing, impersonal and intimidating though they are, these rooms are an essential part of an ever-growing industry - and Buurman believes little can be done to make them more accommodating. 'They're meant to be clinical, they're meant to be sterile,' he says, 'and you want them to be like that. The truth is, all you want to do when you're in that situation is get in and get out.'

Martin Wright, 47, is a journalist and green campaigner living in Stoke Newington, north London. For part of the week he lives with his partner Suki Bristow, 49, a herbalist based in Devon. Suki has two teenage children.

'If I'd been told I had no viable sperm, or only one or two, or that they had their heads up their arses, I'd have been delighted,' says Martin, veteran of five years of trying and failing to have a baby with his partner Suki. 'I particularly wanted it to be me - because if it was me, I could deal with that. In one sense, I'd have been devastated; but it would also have been problem solved, issue gone, life sorted. It wasn't part of my operating system to have kids, so fine: I'd cope with that sadness.'

An ongoing uncertainty is harder, the 47-year-old maintains. Back in the late Nineties, he and Suki (two years his senior) began trying for a baby, and although she was conceiving she kept having early miscarriages.

Month after month, when Suki was ovulating, Martin (who spends part of his week in London) would dash down to the home they shared in Devon. 'I was working way too much, but I'd even cancel meetings to have sex,' he says, 'and lots of it - whether we felt like it or not.'

After 18 months, they decided to seek help. 'First, it was a sperm test,' says Martin, regaling me with anecdotes about his visit to the Homerton Hospital in east London. 'They gave me a little pot, and this bloke behind a counter grunted "Toilets" and gestured along the corridor. So I went into a cubicle with a big gap under the door, and thought, well, I'll have to do the business. I could hear blokes talking, spitting and pissing loudly at the urinals, feet away. Somehow, I delivered the goods.'

That is more than could be said of the NHS. First, the monosyllabic man behind the counter seemed less concerned about the provenance of sperm than Martin, pushing the unlabelled sample to nestle alongside others. Then, the GP's surgery seemed to mislay the results for weeks. 'My recollection is that they fell out from the side of a filing cabinet,' says Martin. But the news was nevertheless good. 'I was fine, with billions of sperm - so no problem there.'

Because Suki had two children by a previous marriage, and was by then past 40, she did not qualify for fertility treatment on the NHS. She and Martin had no choice but to go private, at a hospital in Plymouth.

'It was a very different little room to the one at the Homerton,' he says, 'called the Ocean Suite. It was very nice, in pastel colours, with a carpet and sofas - and you knew it was nice because, now and then, you'd write out a cheque for a couple of thousand quid. A South African nurse asked Suki, "Will you be going in with him, or just him on his own?" We looked at each other, and Suki said: "Just him." Inside, there really was a filing cabinet with bad porn in the bottom drawer.'

The results of Martin's endeavours were mixed - 'huge quantity of sperm, enough to repopulate Belgium,' Martin says, 'but more of them than normal were really deformed, with three heads and all their fingernails wrong or something. But there was still no cause for concern.'

Meanwhile, Suki was given drugs to stimulate ovulation and make her eggs extra ripe before the sperm was inserted into her at the appropriate moment in the fertility suite. Crude though it sounds, it usually works - and it did for Suki, for a while. 'Then, exactly the same thing happened,' Martin explains, grimly. 'She conceived, then, a few weeks later, lost it.' The only path now was IVF.

Both had reservations about the technique. 'It seemed to be crossing the boundary between what is natural and what is not,' says Martin - something he felt strongly in the IVF suite at Plymouth. 'Everyone is in uniform, there's lots of equipment, little lights, machines going bleep. I thought, this is us having a baby, this is really weird. It shouldn't be like this; it should be making love outside after a picnic, but there she is lying with her legs apart and a little camera going inside her.' Three eggs were 'harvested' and implanted, but the pregnancy ended in the usual way - 'a few weeks later, lots of bleeding'.

By 2003, after five years and at least seven early miscarriages, the couple had given up on any prospect of having a child together. Martin's teenage stepchildren, Rosie and Tom, seemed a special blessing. Nevertheless, biological childlessness was a painful state to be in.

A year ago, Martin had a dream. 'I had this very strong image of these wonderful woods near where we used to live,' he says, 'a place that Suki loves. I imagined that, after dying, we'd meet up there. I had this image of a spring day, waiting for Suki. She came along the path with all these kids, seven of them - and I burst into tears when I remembered that dream. It just seemed natural that she would have our children with her.'

Nick Anderson, 39, lives with his partner, Becky, 37, in Hackney, east London. Both are designers. They have a daughter who is three.

'Every day is special,' says Nick, talking about life with his three-year-old daughter Eleanor. 'We so often sit there and just look at her and go, "Wow, that was really worth it".' Delicate and doll-like, she is the product of five rollercoaster years of IVF, surgery, anxiety and hope, after Becky discovered her fallopian tubes were blocked.

For nine months, the couple had been trying for a baby. Becky consulted her doctor and was sent to the Homerton Hospital, in east London, for a laparoscopy - a keyhole inspection of her tubes and ovaries.

'I didn't rush to collect her,' Nick recalls, 'because I honestly didn't think there would be a problem. When I got there, Becky was in tears. She'd just been told her tubes were blocked and she probably wouldn't be able to conceive naturally. She was 29. Then they just left her sitting on her own.'

Immediately, Nick saw his role as that of comforter. 'In the five years following that, I must have said, "Don't worry, we'll get through this thing" more times than I can remember,' he says. 'I'm not one of life's great optimists,' he says, 'but in this case I genuinely was. I never lost hope.'

First, the couple tried natural IVF at St George's Hospital, south London. 'They took the egg out, put it with the sperm and put it back in - but without the drugs to stimulate the ovaries,' says Nick. 'We did two of those, and they didn't work.'

On medical advice, he then gave up coffee and smoking (with the help of acupuncture). 'I tried to cut down on smoking when we started trying for babies,' he says, 'but I gave up completely when we went private and started paying to have babies. You have to make more of an effort!' The effort paid off. 'My sperm were a little bit sluggish to begin with,' he says, 'but were later described as Olympian.'

When giving a sperm sample at St George's, he says, 'I had to go downstairs to this room in a ward where there were lots of children running about. That was really weird - not just because you're trying to have a - well - give a sample, but because you're trying to have babies, and all you can hear is kids.'

I ask whether, in his years of providing samples, Nick had ever failed in his duty. 'No,' he says, resignedly, 'you just have to do it. You can't come out of that room without one - and you've been practising for it all your life, haven't you?'

At the Lister - a private hospital in south London, where the couple went next for conventional IVF - the experience was amusing as well as disconcerting. 'There was a range of porn,' says Nick. 'They'd obviously taken into consideration everybody's tastes - like magazines featuring "the older lady".' Even in the midst of crisis, he and Becky saw the funny side.

Generally, though, levity was in short supply - especially in the waiting room at the Lister. 'It's a very bizarre place,' says Nick, 'because there are couples who are on their second or third time and have kids already, so their children are running around screaming; there's a couple who have just found out they've miscarried; there's a couple there for the first time, and they're upset and in tears - so many different emotions. It's all so intense.'

Compared to that, the sterile, white-walled surroundings of the IVF suite seemed pleasantly anodyne. 'Becky would be lying there, and there'd be a knock at the door and a man in hospital garb would show us a Petri dish and say, "These are the eggs we're going to put back in you." In the room behind the doors, you could see quite a few people with their full masks on, doing lab stuff.'

Finally, the quest was worth it. A further attempt at IVF worked, and Nick was shocked that it was treated just like any normal pregnancy. 'You go through all this hi-tech process costing 10 grand, but once they put the fertilised eggs back, you're just like anyone else.'