While arts festivals present themselves as celebrations of the arts in all their guises, the visual arts often take a back seat. There is a sense that they are an adjunct rather than a focus, something to see between events without ruining your appetite.

At this year's Galway Arts Festival there seems to have been an effort, at least in some quarters, to engage the wider public attention, to propose that the visual arts can and should be a more integral and high-profile part of the programme.

Not least in this cause is Royal Blood, an exhibition of photographs by Erwin Olaf at Galway Arts Centre, the Dutch artist's first showing in the Republic. The exhibition consists of large computer-enhanced photographs of royalty, past and present, who had, or are associated with, a violent demise.

The images are presented with the airbrushed perfection of the fashion industry, full of sexual allure and marketability, iconic figures seemingly unaffected by, or ignoring, their bloody disfigurements, staring out with all the cool, disdainful glamour of a cover for Vogue magazine.

Diana, Princess of Wales looks out at the viewer, an embedded Mercedes emblem projecting from her bloodied arm; a bullet-riddled Tsarina Alexandra still exudes sexuality; Princess Elizabeth of Austria ignores the knife projecting from a gaping wound in her chest; Jackie O, the nearest thing to American royalty, is offered as a bizarre "before and after" of her 1963 experience of the Kennedy assassination, the expression and pose in the second image the same as in the first except for the adornment of blood and brains.

And it goes on. Royal Blood is a provocative take on fashion imagery and the mythologising of royalty, an exhibition that questions the morality of, and our response to, glamour and fashion in a world where unairbrushed reality is a harsher matter altogether. This is a commentary that is repulsive yet strangely attractive in its presentation, by an artist not afraid to ask some uncomfortable questions. Sensationalist, maybe; pertinent, certainly.

Another first-time showing in the Republic, Paul M. Smith's Action light-box installations, also at Galway Arts Centre, offer another take on photography and advertising. As in earlier work, Smith uses himself as the besuited model for his posed action shots, abseiling, skydiving and jumping. Smith sends up the machismo and insouciant, polished improbability of the likes of James Bond with all the polished perfection of advertising imagery.

Previous experiences in the British army - as a combat engineer, paramedic and publicity photographer - continue to inform Smith's artistic endeavour. While his previous work has addressed darker and more serious issues, these likeable Action Man self-portraits have a strong sense of tongue-in-cheek fun.

The post-modern philosopher and self-styled hyper-realist Jean Baudrillard has devoted considerable energies to the exegesis of photography and it's relationship or non-relationship, to the real world.

As well as writing on the subject at length, Baudrillard has for many years practised the form, and some of the results are presented at the gallery of NUI, Galway, offering an intriguing qualifier to Baudrillard's thoughts on the process that he describes as "the writing of light".

The photographs, in colour and titled simply by location and year, explore a world of textures, planes and levels of perception, playing with perspective and the idea of skins and surfaces: how one level qualifies another, how juxtapositions create an unspoken commentary. The underlying theme is a celebration of the surprising and extraordinary within the ordinary, a sense of trompe l'oeil, a quiet subversion of the "normal".

An advertising hoarding purports to be a hotel, except the wrinkled paper on which it is printed brings the image into rather more surreal territory; painted figures on walls appear to interact with people in the street; weed-overgrown water reflects a parked car into a state of decay.

The works suggest fleeting moments frozen, and there is a sense of spontaneity that disguises careful consideration. These are open-ended photographs, offering food for philosophical meditation as well as the engaging and eloquent pleasures of a finely attuned artistic vision.

Elsewhere at NUI, Galway, in the Aula Maxima, is a retrospective of prints by R.B.Kitaj. While Kitaj is primarily regarded as a painter and draughtsman, he has also engaged in a variety of print techniques, traditional and otherwise. His forays into screen-printing, which began in the 1960s, contributed significantly to the exploration of the medium as an artistic process rather than as a vehicle for commercial applications.

This retrospective spans more than 30 years of printmaking and sheds light on Kitaj's approach. As with much of his oeuvre, his concerns are with the cultural, social and political history of the 20th century, often with reference to his Jewish background.

Included in this exhibition are examples of the filmic Mahler Becomes Politics, Beisbol and First Series - Some Poets suites from the mid- and late 1960s, incorporating found textual and collage elements, redolent of, yet ideologically separate from, the pop-art iconoclasm abroad at the time.

Later works, such as the graphical, powerful gaze of Man With Matisse Tattoo from 1978 confirm the power of Kitaj's artistic vision. More recent prints have moved towards both more traditional print processes - lithography and dry point - and the draughtsmanship that has been the basis of Kitaj's work. They take on a more spontaneous quality, embracing a sense of great humanity and warmth. Portraiture features, both in evocative depictions of self, family and friends and in classically rendered Old Testament figures that assume powerful archetypal presences. It is a fascinating show that adds valuable commentary to Kitaj's enormous contribution to 20th-century art.

Over the course of the festival, the West End Gallery is offering two exhibitions. In its main area is A-Stray, a solo show by Pauline Keena that consists of a series of large fabric sculptures of stuffed, stitched and tied materials that have been transmuted into organic, organ-like forms the colour of old bandages, replete with rough stitching worthy of a Hammer Frankenstein. The results are hung up like mutant carcasses.

Keena's slightly misanthropic perception of body is borne out by the accompanying sketches and watercolours: a self-portrait where facial features sit together in an uncomfortably informal, organic manner; slightly grotesque life studies of hairy, lumpy flesh ill at ease within its natural confines, skin twitchy and discontented. This is a view of humanity at its least appealing, quirky, vaguely disturbing yet strangely fascinating.

The other half of the gallery is given over to Akin X, the 10th annual group show by five artists based in Co Galway. Dolores Lyne delivers some dense, dark, meditative water studies, subtly achieving great activity in her paintwork, and there are also atmospheric studies of islands and a set of pastels that find energy in rock and sky.

Siobhβn Piercy explores classical and geometric imagery in her small, concentrated screen prints, offering connotations of duality and opposition, of the relationship between the spiritual and the physical. In her etchings, Margaret Irwin has found a rich seam of inspiration in a series of works based on hand studies, Leonie King continues to investigate colour and composition in her prints and Jay Murphy presents a series of pastels that celebrate There are also some sure-fire crowd-pleasers, including the cornucopian Art Of Hurling group exhibition in Kennys and John B. Vallely's bright, expressionist portraits of traditional musicians in Mulligan's record shop. It is a strong and varied programme that challenges, entertains and, perhaps most importantly engages.

Galway Arts Festival continues until Sunday. Information from 091-566577