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Guidelines for Visual Arts Submissions

Thank you for considering submitting your work to Orion. We are always looking for single images and feature sets, as well as covers, picture essays, and portfolios…and all featuring a wide range of content related to our relationships with the natural world. Orion can accept specific story submissions or samples to keep on file and if you email us, we’ll also add you to an e-mail call out for art that we do each issue. For sending in materials, low-res via e-mail is preferred (fit a 1000px by 1000px box and save to medium jpeg quality so as not to fill up our inbox), or we can do ftp or web-based download, or send a CD. In whichever case, please do not send materials we will have to return. We will always request final files and arrange the usage before we use anything.

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 doing to address them. If this statement feels obtuse to you (beside the bad grammar), spend some time with a few 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 much use for pretty nature images. Very conceptual work (“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—at least 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 objectively they do describe most of how we’re using what we’re using at the current time.

So, all that said, creativity and your active collaboration in coming up with appropriate stories is key…and we are open to going back and forth to try and shape a concept from your project…As we said and will again, you should be familiar with Orion. We like those places where other disciplines crossover with ‘environmentalism’ or ‘ecology’ or whatever the new hip buzz word is, and look for work that is interpreting those relationships and we love long-term personal projects, perhaps that you’ve not been able to place elsewhere perhaps because it’s too personal, too opinionated, or too complicated.

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.

Jason Houston, Picture Editor
jhouston@orionmagazine.org
Orion
187 Main Street
Great Barrington, MA 01230