FAQ

Other than being published in our PDF magazine, some photos might appear as BLUR promotional material on our Facebook page, in our promotional YouTube videos, in our online digital previews (ISSU) and other similar channels. Some photos may be re-used for special or print editions. All such use is directed solely to advertise BLUR magazine and reach wider audiences for your art. Additionally, your photo never appears without your artist information (except sometimes in the YouTube video due to production/editing reasons).

Although we’re treating all purchases as donations to our nonprofit, BLUR is a paid magazine, so in a sense it does generate revenue by publishing artwork. However, this revenue is used solely to cover production costs (hardware and services rendered). The selection and editing process for a magazine of this caliber is both a time and resource consuming endeavor. BLUR is published by a nonprofit organization registered in Croatia (EU) and any outstanding profit generated by our association, that isn’t used to cover operating expenses of the association and editorial fees, by law must be reinvested into public-facing projects of Photography Association Creatus or used to support similar projects in the photographic community. Such projects might include organising or sponsoring exhibitions, sponsoring galleries, launching other websites dedicated to photography or the history of photography (such as the Tošo Dabac historical, in-memoriam archive), etc. This basically means that the revenue we receive is distributed back to the photographic community in one way or another!

Yes. This helps us avoid any mistakes. Additionally, this ensures that each author is duly informed about how their artwork is used. Once an author gives us their final written approval, the authorized material will be committed into production and no further changes to the material will be possible unless it’s absolutely urgent or factually extremely relevant. On certain occasions minor changes might be done after your authorization by the editorial staff, but these are mostly due to technical reasons and will not diverge from your authorized copy in any significant way.

Unfortunately not, that would take too much time and effort. That’s why we authorize everything beforehand, so please make sure to double check everything!

You can rest assured that if not selected for publication, your photos will not be held by BLUR magazine. They’re automatically deleted from our servers after 48 hours, and are deleted from our offline archive during the selection process, if we don’t decide to publish. Published photos are kept offline in our archive, while one to three cropped versions can be found in our online archive advertising the issue in which the photos were published.

Yes. Nude photography is an important part of our photographic culture for more than a century and is by extension welcome in BLUR magazine. Of course, there is a clear distinction between the artistic portrayal of the nude human body and graphical pornographic content, which is not tolerated. However, we do accept images that depict genitalia, as well as aesthetically thoughtful imagery of the sexual act, as long as it’s done in a tasteful and artistic manner. Our editorial staff reserves the right to interpret such imagery independently and will not enter into any discussions over its decisions not to publish a certain photo.

There are many valid reasons for this. First and foremost, it helps us avoid production bottlenecks and assures we don’t miss production deadlines. BLUR is a volunteer project and we sometimes have difficulty organizing the entire staff at the same time. Keeping a healthy reserve of material on stock enables a worldwide team to organize their time more efficiently to get things done. Textual material needs to be proofread, graphically laid out and authorized by you – the photographer – before publication. All this requires time. One other major reason for doing this is to ensure that BLUR remains colorful and unpredictable. We often mix up the content we receive from photographers in order to keep every issue interesting and fresh. We’re not overly worried about publishing photos chronologically and pay close attention not to degrade the overall quality of a future issue just because it’s summer, everyone is out partying and we receive fewer submissions. That’s why we sometimes keep really good stuff on ice for a future issue – simply thinking ahead.

You can rest assured that if not selected for publication, your photos will not be held by BLUR magazine. They’re automatically deleted from our servers after 48 hours, and are deleted from our offline archive during the selection process, if we don’t decide to publish. Published photos are kept offline in our archive, while one to three cropped versions can be found in our online archive advertising the issue in which the photos were published.

Due to translation, proofreading, and editing tasks, the editorial team tries to get as much of the material as possible well in advance. Therefore, there is no fixed time limit within which a certain photo will be published. For example, a particular photo might be a better thematic fit in a future issue. You’ll receive a notification in due time.

BLUR’s been around for a while now, since 2007. Since then it has grown to a public of over 200 countries, and we receive thousands of submissions weekly. And this being the internet, you can imagine that most of what we receive are cat pics and snapshots from mostly genuinely nice people who love photography, but simply can’t pass our publishing criteria. If a human were to reply to so many people, who are simply trying and are excited, with negative replies, that would be too depressing for everyone.

We’ve experimented with automated responses, community critique, we even had public voting rounds at one point, but all of this proved either too cumbersome to implement or was, in its own way, just as cold, maybe even colder. So we simply decided to reply only positively.

Since we made that decision we’ve had little complaints, and the community vibe kind of settled around that policy, so we left it at that. If the community vibe changes, of course, we’ll change too, but for the time being we simply don’t send out negative replies.

We’re sorry if that seems cold; as you can see from historical perspective – it’s really not our intention.

BLUR magazine’s editorial team is not obliged to reply or justify its decision to publish or not publish any photo or project. We only notify authors that are selected for publication, and we send out any material to the photographer for written authorisation before we publish an issue. Please read the question above for more context. Thank you.

We respect the decisions other magazines take when selecting photos for their publications, however we have our own editorial policy that might differ from the rest of the industry. BLUR magazine is dedicated to art photography. For that reason, even photos that are technically perfect do not necessarily fit into BLUR magazine’s identity. This does not automatically mean we deem your photography sub-par or bad. We might simply feel it’s out of place in BLUR at a given time.

BLUR magazine attempts to publish the work of as many photographers with quality work as possible. If a particular artist really stands out, we try to present them through an interview, project, or in some other way. In any case, we always try to keep a period of time between repeated appearances by the same photographers. Therefore, there is no need to send us new photos for each new issue.

To get a feeling what’s usually published in Gallery 36, download our free PDF special edition BLUR GALLERY 2013 that contains all photos published in the (then) Gallery section of BLUR throughout 2013. You’ll immediately notice we tend not to publish average photography, but almost always highly thought out, original and high-quality work meant to inspire and amaze. We don’t care about the technical aspects of these images, nor is the photo required to discuss a certain theme. In this regard, Gallery 36 is completely random – the only decisive factor is the overall quality and originality of the resulting image.

There are always more photos suitable for publication than we’ve been able to squeeze into the next issue. The rest of the suitable photos will be reserved for future issues, based on the decision of our photography editors. This makes Gallery 36 unpredictable and fun, and most importantly – the quality remains amazing throughout the year, without dry spells in months when people submit less work. We tend to spread out quality photographs over several issues rather than publish them in chronological order in which they were submitted.

Due to heavy interest for publication in BLUR, our submission systems are automated. This means our server will automatically disqualify any photo that doesn’t meet these guidelines. If the photo is too small (longer edge smaller than 1500px), the editors will not even get to see your photo to override the automated system decisions, so please make sure you follow these guidelines correctly.

No. We’ve taken great care to inform all interested authors regarding all the specifics related to our submission process, through this FAQ, through the submission webpage and e-mail confirmation messages after submission. We do not send personalized replies to authors who failed to understand these instructions, as there are simply too many photos going through our servers every day and we need to rely on automation in order to be able to manage this workload and keep up with the high quality of the selection process that makes BLUR what it is and why you like it. Some people do find this approach cold or rude, although we sincerely don’t mean it that way at all. Please understand we’re read in, and receive submissions from, over 200 countries worldwide. As a volunteer project, we’re unable to set up a communication centre just to inform people about things that are already clearly explained on our website. Thanks for understanding! 🙂

No. BLUR magazine’s editorial team is not obliged to reply or justify its decision to publish or not publish any photo or project. We only notify authors that are selected for publication, and we send out any material to the photographer for written authorization before we publish an issue.

Our photo submissions forms are limited to two photos per author for individual work (choose wisely!), while projects/series can be uploaded in a batch of up to 20 photos. You can send in more photos by re-submitting the form, just in case you made a mistake, but misuse of the submission form to upload a lot of photos is something neither we or our server consider that fair use, so do it at your own peril. Automated firewalls, IP blacklisting of malicious users… we don’t want to get into it – it gets a bit technical. 🙂

The submission form will show you a confirmation of your submission if everything went according to plan. You’ll also receive an automated e-mail confirmation if our server has your files saved and categorized. Make sure you use your real e-mail address and that it’s typed in correctly in order to ensure you get your feedback.

Nowhere – yet. 🙂 The photos you submit will not be published automatically. They will be subject to editorial review and published only if the BLUR editors decide the photos are in line with BLUR’s policy, quality requirements and any other editorial criteria, and this is not subject to discussion.

Project submissions usually involve authors that have published them on websites, and we don’t accept direct file uploads for projects due to server strain (lots of photos per project, with lots of projects submitted, requires infrastructure BLUR cannot yet afford; Gallery 36 submissions are the most we can handle at this point). If you don’t have a website describing your project, you can send us photos via Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, MediaFire, Wikisend, or any similar file sharing solution, by creating a download/share link and pasting it into the website URL field or the Description field of your project submission.

You can rest assured that if not selected for publication, your photos will not be held by BLUR magazine. They’re automatically deleted from our servers after 48 hours, and are deleted from our offline archive during the selection process, if we don’t decide to publish. Published photos are kept offline in our archive, while one to three cropped versions can be found in our online archive advertising the issue in which the photos were published.

Yes. Our entire website is served via https, so it’s protected with a 2048-bit SSL certificate that makes sure any data you send through our website is kept private between your browser and our server. Furthermore, we don’t handle your payment – PayMill and PayPal do, and they’re certified financial institutions with industry standard protection. This means we don’t store your credit card credentials on our servers – we never even see them.

BLUR magazine is published by a nonprofit NGO and uses a pay what you want donation system to enable download access to an individual issue, with a symbolic $2 minimum price. We respect whatever value you attach to our work, so we leave the final amount up to you. All of the revenue is directed towards publishing BLUR, funding its activities and exhibitions, ensuring its quality and, hopefully, keeping it online for many years to come. And we thank you for that. If you’d like to have access to the entire BLUR archive, you can also subscribe, in which case you won’t have to go through the checkout process before downloading any of our issues – subscribers can simply browse and download every issue right in the archive.  

This is done for practical reasons in day to day production. BLUR magazine sometimes advertises in print magazines, and occasionally organizes exhibitions that are branded with BLUR visuals. Therefore, we ask each artist who has several photos published in our magazine to include two in print resolution so that we can respond to media requests and/or event organizers in a timely manner. Of course, all photographs used in this way are signed, and the photographer’s copyrights are completely protected.

In these times of photographic hyper-production, BLUR magazine aims to slow the pace and encourage its readers to reflect more on the images and to experience photography more profoundly. This is why BLUR omits the technical specifics of photographs and focuses instead on creative, impactful photography and its creators.