Guidelines for Visual Arts Submissions

Thank you for considering submitting your work to Orion. We are always looking for single images and feature worthy series, as well as covers, picture essays, and portfolios that explore and interpret our complex relationships with the natural world. Orion will accept story submissions or samples to keep on file. We also send out an email call for submissions each issue (just let me know you’d like to be added).

The most important thing we can suggest is that you know Orion and consider how your work is appropriate for our pages. Orion is about exploring environmental and social issues and looking at what and how people are going about addressing them. If this statement feels obtuse to you (beside the bad grammar), spend some time with a few recent back issues and see if it makes any more sense. Though the subjects we explore vary widely and our needs are very broad, we can tell you that we’re typically NOT looking for straight exposés of environmental catastrophes, and we don’t have frequent need for pretty nature images. Very conceptual work (e.g., “this photo of a hole in a lone tree represents the emptiness of man’s inhumanity to man in a world without nature…”) is also often hard to place in Orion—even when inspired by nature—unless the concepts and subjects line up just right. These are not rules and if they were we’d always be happy to break them, but they do objectively describe most of how we’re using what we’re using at the current time.

As we said and will again, you should be familiar with Orion.

Please also note that we are not an “Art” magazine and do need to think literally about how the context of the work as presented in Orion will help fulfill our broader editorial mission.

FORMAT:

We receive many submissions and following these guidelines is a requirement to ensuring your work is considered for publication. Low-res jpeg images via a web-gallery is required. Images can be formatted to approximately 1000px on the short edge and saved to medium jpeg quality to keep the file sizes small. **Please prepare your image gallery, upload to an online lightbox (or other accessible, online location), and submit an e-mail with a short description of the project (no more than 100 words), a short bio of the artist (no more than 100 words), and the corresponding online gallery/lightbox link. Media submissions that are e-mailed as attachments will not be considered. We simply do not have the e-mail server capacity to handle the volume of submissions via attachments, hence the requirement for a link to your imagery hosted somewhere on the web.

Sumanth Prabhaker
Editor, Orion Magazine
sumanth@orionmagazine.org

1 Short Street
Northampton, MA 01060